I have already described the shock which the reappearance of Feccles had administered to my nerves.
Normally, I should have felt very awkward indeed, but the cocaine lifted me easily over the fence.
The incident became welcome; an additional adventure in the fairy tale which we were living. Lou herself was all gush and giggles to an extent which a month earlier I should have thought a shade off. But everything was equally exquisite on this grand combination honeymoon.
Feccles appeared extremely amused by the encounter. I asked him with the proper degree of concern if he had had my note. He said no, he’d been called suddenly away on business, I told him what I had written, with added apologies.
The long journey had tired me deep down. I took things more seriously, though the cocaine prevented my realising that this was the case.
“My dear fellow,” he protested. “I’m extremely annoyed that you should have troubled yourself about the business at all. As a matter of fact, what happened is this. I went round to see those men at four o’clock, as arranged on the ’phone, and they were really so awfully decent about the whole thing that I had to let them in for five thousand, and they wrote me their cheque on the spot. Now, of course, you mustn’t imagine that I’d let an old pal down. Any time you find yourself with a little loose cash, just weigh in. You can have it out of my bit.”
“Well, that’s really too good of you,” I said, “and I won’t forget it. It’ll be all right, I suppose, now you’ve got the thing through, to wait till I get back to England.”
“Why, of course,” he replied. “Don’t think about business at all. It was really rotten of me to talk shop to a man on his honeymoon.”
Lou took up the conversation. “But do tell us,” she began, “why this thusness. It suits you splendidly, you know. But after all, I’m a woman.”
Feccles suddenly became very solemn. He went to the door of the coupé and looked up and down the corridor; then he slid the door to and began to speak in a whisper.
“This is a very serious business,” he said, and paused. He took out his keys and played with them, as if uncertain how far to go. He thrust them back into his pocket with a decisive gesture.
“Look here, old chap,” he said, “I’ll take a chance on you. We all know what you did for England during the war – and take one thing with another, you’re about my first pick.”
He stopped short. We looked at him blankly, though we were seething with some blind suppressed excitement whose nature we could hardly describe.
He took out a pipe, and began to nibble the vulcanite rather nervously. He drew a deep breath, and looked Lou straight in the face.
“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 Swinburne 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 fair game; and his idiomatic Italian invariably deterred the would-be sportsman. Even at the hotel, he fought the manager over the weekly bill, and compelled him to accept a much lower figure than his dreams had indicated.
Of course, most of his time was occupied with keeping watch on the man he was trailing; and he kept us very amused with the account of his progress.
“I shall never be grateful enough to you, if I bring this off as I think I shall,” he said. “It will be the turning point in my official career. I don’t mind telling you they’ve treated me rather shabbily at home about one or two things I’ve done. But if I bag this bird, they can hardly say no to anything I may ask.”
At the same time, it was clear that he took a genuine friendly interest in his love-birds, as he called us. He had had a disappointment himself, he said, and it had put him off the business personally, but he was glad to say it hadn’t soured his nature, and he took a real pleasure in seeing people so ideally happy as we were.
The only thing, he said, that made him a little uneasy and discontented was that he hadn’t got in touch with the people who ran the Gatto Fritto, which was an extremely exciting and dangerous kind of night club which indulged in pleasures of so esoteric a kind that no other place in Europe had anything to compare with it.
Chapter IX
THE GATTO FRITTO
It was about the end of the third week, I discover from Lou’s Diary (I had lost all count of time myself), that he came in one day with a smile of subtle triumph in his eyes.
“I’ve got on to the ropes,” he said, “but I think I ought in fairness to warn you that the Gatto Fritto is a pretty hot place. I wouldn’t mind taking you as long as you go in disguise and have a gun in your pocket, but I really can’t take it on my conscience to have Lady Pendragon along.”
I was so full up with cocaine I hardly knew what he was saying. It was the easiest way out to nod assent and watch the clouds fighting each other to get hold of the sun.
I was betting on that big white elephant on the horizon. There were two black cobras and a purple hippopotamus against him; but I couldn’t help that. With those magnificent tusks he ought to be able to settle their business, and only to look at his legs you could see the old sun hadn’t got a dog’s chance. I can’t see why people haven’t the sense to keep still when a fight of this kind is in progress. What’s the referee for, anyway?
It was extremely annoying of Lou to protest in that passionate shrill voice of hers that she was going to the Gatto Fritto, and if she didn’t she’d take to keeping cats herself, and fry them, and make me eat them!
I don’t know how long she went on. It was perfectly gorgeous to hear her. I knew what it meant just as soon as we could get rid of that swine Feccles.
Hang it all, one doesn’t want another man on one’s honeymoon!
So there was Feccles turning to me in a sort of limp, helpless protest, imploring me to put my foot down about it.
So I said, “Feccles, old top, you’re the right sort. I always liked you at school; and I shall never forget what you’ve done for me these last thirty or forty years or whatever it is we’ve been in Capri, and Lloyd George can trust you to nip that blighter you’re after, why shouldn’t I trust you to see us through this fun at the Gatto Fritto?”
Lou clapped her hands, screaming with merriment, but Feccles said:
“Now, that’s all right. But this is a very serious business. You’re not going about it in the right spirit. We’ve got to go about it very quietly and soberly, and then open up when the word comes over the top.”
We pretended to pull ourselves together to please him, but I couldn’t blind my eyes to the fact that I was likely to lose my money, because the white elephant had turned into a quite ordinary Zebu or Brahman cow, or at the best a two-humped or Bactrian dromedary, in any case, an animal entirely unfitted by nature to carry the money of a cautious backer.
Agitated by this circumstance, I was hardly in a condition to realise the nature of the proposals laid before the meeting by Worshipful Brother Feccles, Acting Deputy Grand Secretary General.
But roughly they were to this effect: That we were to lock up all our money and jewellery, except a little small change, as an act of precaution, and Feccles would arrive in due course, with disguises for me and Lou as Neapolitan fisherfolk, and we were to take nothing but a revolver apiece and a little small change, and we were to slip off the terrace of the hotel after dark without any one seeing, and there would be a motor-boat across to Sorrento; and there would be an automobile, so we could get into Naples at about one o’clock in the morning, and then we were to go to a certain drinking place, the Fauno Ebbrio, and as soon as the coast was clear he would pick us up and take us along to the Gatto Fritto, and we would know for the first time what life was really like.
Well, I call that a perfectly straight, decent, sensible programme. It’s the duty of every Englishman to learn as much of foreign affairs as he can without interfering with his business. That sort of knowledge will always come in useful in case of another European War. It was knowing that sort of thing that had put Feccles
where he was in the Secret Service, the trusted confident of those mysterious intelligences that watch over the welfare of our beloved country.
Thank you, that will conclude the evening’s entertainment.
I will say this for Feccles. He always understood instinctively when he wasn’t wanted. So immediately the arrangements were made, he excused himself hastily, because he had to go down to the Villa where his victim was staying, and fix a dictaphone in the room where he was going to have dinner.
So I had Lou all to myself until he came with the disguises the next day in the afternoon. And I wasn’t going to waste a minute.
I admit I was pretty sick about the way the white cloud let me down. I’d have gone after the silly old sun myself if I hadn’t been a married man.
However, there we were alone, alone for ever, Lou and I in Capri, it was all much too good to be true! Sunlight and moonlight and starlight! They were all in her eyes. And she handed out the cocaine with such a provocative gesture! I knew what it was to be insane. I could understand perfectly well why the silly fools that aren’t insane are afraid of being insane. I’d been that way myself when I didn’t know any better.
This rotten little race of men measures the world by its own standard. It is lost in the vastness of the Universe, and is consequently afraid of everything that doesn’t happen to fit its own limits.
Lou and I had discarded the miserable measures of mankind. That sort of thing is all right for tailors and men of science; but we had sprung in one leap to be conterminous with the Universe. We were as incommensurable as the ratio of a circle to its diameter. We were as imaginary and unreal from their point of view as the square root of minus one.
We didn’t ask humanity to judge us. It was simply a case of mistaken identity to regard us as featherless bipeds at all. We may have looked like human beings to their eyes; in fact, they sent in bills and things as if we had been human beings.
But I refuse to be responsible for the mistakes of the inferior animals. I humour them to some extent in their delusions, because they’re lunatics and ought to be humoured. But it’s a long way between that and admitting that their hallucinations have any basis in fact.
Diary of a Drug Fiend Page 12