" Does it suggest anything to you," he murmured, almost inaudibly, " a man's leaving Paris at a moment's notice in the middle of a vast financial scheme, and turning up in Italy, heavily camouflaged ? "
"The police on your track! " giggled Lou.
He broke into hearty, good-natured laughter. Getting warm," he said. " But try again."
The explanation flashed into my mind at once. He saw what I was thinking, and smiled and nodded.
" Oh, I see," said Lou wisely and bent over to him and whispered in his ear. The words were
- " Secret Service."
That's it," said Feccles softly. "And this is where you come in. Look here."
He brought out a passport from his pocket and opened it. He was Monsieur Hector Laroche, of Geneva, so it appeared ; by profession a courier. We nodded comprehensively.
" I was rather at my wits' end when I saw you," he went on. " I'm on the trail of a very dangerous man who has got into the confidence of some English people living in Capri. That's where you're going, isn't it ? "
" Yes," we said, feeling ourselves of international importance.
" Well, it's like this. If I turn up in Capri, which is a very small place, without a particularly good excuse, people will look at me and talk about me, and if they look too hard and talk too much, it's ten to one I'm spotted, not necessarily for what I am, but as a stranger of suspicious character. And if the man I'm after gets on his guard, there'll be absolutely nothing doing."
" Yes," I said, " I see all that, but-well, we'd do anything for good old England-goes without saying, but how can we help you out ? "
" Well," said Feccles, " I don't see why it should put you out very much. You needn't even see me. But if I could pose as your courier, go ahead and book your rooms and look after your luggage and engage boats and that sort of thing for you, I shouldn't need to be explained. As things are, it might even save you trouble. They're the most frightful brigands round here ; and anything that looks like a tourist, especially of the honeymoon species, is liable to all sorts of bother and robbery."
Well, the thing did seem almost providential; as a matter of fact, I had been thinking of getting a man to keep off the jackals, and this was killing two birds with one stone.
Lou was obviously delighted with the arrangement. " Oh, but you must let us do more than that," she said. " If we could only help you spot this swine ! "
"You bet I will," said Feccles heartily, and we all shook hands on it. " Any time anything happens where you could be useful, I'll tell you what to do. But of course you'll have to remember the rules of the service-absolute silence and obedience. And you stand or fall on your own feet, and if the umpire says 'out,' you're out, and nobody's going to pick up the pieces."
This honeymoon was certainly coming out in the most wonderful way. We had left the cinema people at the post. Here we were, without any effort of our own, right in the middle of the most fascinating intrigues of the most mysterious kind. And all that on the top of the most wonderful love there was in the world, and heroin and cocaine to help us make the most of the tiniest details.
"Well," said I to Feccles, " this suits me down to the ground. I'm trying to forget what you said about my brain, because it isn't good for a young man to be puffed up with intellectual vanity. But I certainly am the luckiest man in the world."
M. Hector Laroche gave us a delightful hour, telling of some of his past exploits in the war. He was as modest as he was brave ; but for all that, we could see well enough what amazing astuteness he had brought to the service of our country in her hour of peril. We could imagine him making rings round the lumbering minds of the Huns with their slow pedantic processes.
The only drawback to the evening was that we couldn't get him to take any snow. And you know what that means-you feel the man's somehow out of the party. He excused himself by saying that the regulations forbade it. He agreed with us that it was rotten red-tape, but " of course, they're right in a way, there are quite a lot of chaps that wouldn't know how to use it, might get a bit above themselves and give something away-you know how it is."
So we left him quietly smoking, and went back to our own little cubby and had the most glorious night, whispering imaginary intrigues which somehow lent stronger wing to the real rapture of our love. We neither of us slept. We simply sailed through the darkness to find the dawn caressing the crest of Posilippo and the first glint of sunrise signalling ecstatic greetings to the blue waters of the Bay of Naples.
When the train stopped, there was Hector Laroche at the door, ordering everybody about in fluent Italian. We had the best suite in the best hotel, and our luggage arrived not ten minutes later than we did, and breakfast was a perfect poem, and we had a box for the opera and our passages booked for the following day for Capri, where a suite was reserved for us at the Caligula. We saw the Museum in the morning and automobiled out to Pompeii in the afternoon, and yet M. Laroche had managed everything for us so miraculously well that even this very full day left us perfectly fresh, murmuring through half-closed lips the magic sentence
" Dolce far niente."
The majority of people seem to stumble through this world without any conception of the possibilities of enjoyment. It is, of course, a matter of temperament.
But even the few who can appreciate the language of Shelley, Keats and Swinbume, look on those conceptions as Utopian.
Most people acquiesce in the idea that the giddy exaltation of Prometheus Unbound, for example, is an imaginary feeling. I suppose, in fact, that one wouldn't get much result by giving heroin and cocaine, however cunningly mixed, to the average man. You can't get out of a thing what isn't there.
In ninety-nine cases out of a hundred, any stimulant of whatever nature operates by destroying temporarily the inhibitions of education.
The ordinary drunken man loses the veneer of civilisation. But if you get the right man, the administration of a drug is quite likely to suppress his mental faculties, with the result that his genius is set free. Coleridge is a case in point. When he happened to get the right quantity of laudanum in him, he dreamed Kubla Khan, one of the supreme treasures of the language.
And why is it incomplete ? Because a man called from Porlock on business and called him back to his normal self, so that he forgot all but a few lines of the poem. Similarly, we have Herbert Spencer taking morphia very day of his life, decade after decade. Without morphia, he would simply have been a querulous invalid, preoccupied with bodily pain. With it, he was the genius whose philosophy summarised the thought of the nineteenth century.
But Lou and I were born with a feeling for romance and adventure. The ecstasy of first love was already enough to take us out of ourselves to a certain extent. The action of the drugs intensified and spiritualised these possibilities.
The atmosphere of Capri, and the genius of Feccles for preventing any interference with our pleasure, made our first fortnight on the island an unending trance of unearthly beauty.
He never allowed us a chance to be bored, and yet, he never intruded. He took all the responsibilities off our hands, he arranged excursions to Anacapri, to the Villa of Tiberius and to the various grottos. Once or twice he suggested a wild night in Naples, and we revelled in the peculiar haunts of vice with which that city abounds.
Nothing shocked us, nothing surprised us. Every incident of life was the striking of a separate note in the course of an indescribable symphony.
He introduced us to the queerest people, drove us into the most mysterious quarters. But everything that happened wove itself intoxicatingly into the tapestry of love.
We went out on absurd adventures. Even when they were disappointing from the ordinary standpoint, the disappointment itself seemed to add piquancy to the joke.
One couldn't help being grateful to the man for his protecting care. We went into plenty of places where the innocent tourist is considered