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We had just time to get down to the Gare de Lyon for the train de luxe. A sense oi infinite relief enveloped us as we left Paris behind ; and this was accompanied with an overwhelming fatigue which in itself was unspeakably delicious. The moment our heads touched the pillows we sank like young children into exquisite deep slumber, and we woke early in the morning, exhilarated beyond all expression by the Alpine air that enlarged our lungs ; that thrilled us with its keen intensity ; that lifted us above the pettiness of civilisation, exalting us to communion with the eternal ; our souls soared to the primaeval peaks that towered above the train. They flowed across the limpid lakes, they revelled with the raging Rhone.

Many people have the idea that the danger of drugs lies in the fact that one is tempted to fly to them for refuge whenever one is a little bored or depressed or annoyed. That is true, of course ; but if it stopped there, only a small class of people would stand in real danger.

For example, this brilliant morning, with the sun sparkling on the snow and the water, the whole earth ablush with his glory, the pure keen air rejoicing our lungs; we certainly did say to ourselves, our young eyes ablaze with love and health and happiness, that we didn't need any other element to make our poetry perfect.

I said this without a hint of hesitation. For one thing, we felt like Christian when the burden of his sins fell off his back, at getting away from Paris and civilisation and convention and all that modern artificiality implies.

We had neither the need to get rid of any depression, nor that to increase our already infinite intoxication; ourselves and our love and the boundless beauty of the ever changing landscape, a permanent perfection travelling for its pleasure through inexhaustible possibilities !

Yet almost before the words were out of our mouths, a sly smile crept over Lou's loveliness and kindled the same subtly secret delight in my heart.

She offered me a pinch of heroin with the air of communicating some exquisitely esoteric sacrament and I accepted it and measured her a similar dose on my own hand as if some dim delirious desire devoured us. We took it not because we needed it ; but because the act of consummation was, so to speak, an act of religion.

It was the very fact that it was not an act of necessity which made it an act of piety.

In the same way, I cannot say that the dose did us any particular good. It was at once a routine and a ritual. It was a commemoration like the Protestant communion, and at the same time a consecration like the Catholic. It reminded us that we were heirs to the royal rapture in which we were afloat. But also it refreshed that rapture.

We noticed that in spite of the Alpine air, we did not seem to have any great appetite for breakfast, and we appreciated with the instantaneous sympathy which united us that the food of mortals was too gross for the gods.

That sympathy was so strong and so subtle, so fixed in our hearts, that we could not realise the rude, raw fact that we had ever existed as separate beings. The past was blotted out in the calm contemplation of our beatitude. We understood the changeless ecstasy that radiates from statues of the Buddha ; the mysterious triumph on the mouth of Morma Lisa, and the unearthly and ineffable glee of the attitude of Haide' Lamoureux.

We smoked in shining silence as the express swept through the plains of Lombardy. Odd fragments of Shelley's lines on the Euganean hills flitted through my mind like azure or purple phantoms.

" The vaporous plain of Lombardy Islanded with cities fair."

A century had commercialised the cities for the most part into cockpits and cesspools. But Shelley still shone serene as the sun itself.

" Many a green isle needs must be In this wide sea of misery."

Everything he had touched with his pen had blossomed into immortality. And Lou and I were living in the land which his prophetic eyes had seen.

I thought of that incomparable idyll, I will not call it an island, to which he invites Emilia, in Epipsychidion.

Lou and I, my love and I, my wife and I, we were not merely going there ; we had always been there and should always be. For the name of the island, the name of the house, the name of Shelley, and the name of Lou and me, they were all one name-Love.

" The winged words with which my song would pierce Into the heights of love's rare universe

Are chains of lead about its flight of fire,

I pant, I sink, I tremble, I expire."

I noticed, in fact, that our physical selves seemed to be acting as projections of our thought. We were both breathing rapidly and deeply. Our faces were flushed, suffused with the sunlight splendour of our bloods that beat time to the waltz of our love.

Waltz ? No, it was something wilder than a waltz. The Mazurka, perhaps. No, there was something still more savage in our souls.

I thought of the furious fandango of the gypsies of Granada, of the fanatical frenzy of the religious Moorish rioters chopping at themselves with little sacred axes till the blood streams down their bodies, crazily crimson in the stabbing sunlight, and making little scabs of mire upon the torrid trampled sand.

I thought of the mcenads and Bacchus ; I saw them through the vivid eyes of Euripides and Swinburne. And still unsatisfied, I craved for stranger symbols yet. I became a Witch-Doctor presiding over a cannibal feast, driving the yellow mob of murderers into a fiercer Comus-rout, as the maddening beat of the tom-tom and the sinister scream of the bull-roarer destroy every human quality in the worshippers and make them elemental energies ; Valkyrie-vampires surging and shrieking on the summit of the storm.

I do not even know whether to call this a vision, or how to classify it psychologically. It was simply happening to me-and to Lou-though we were sitting decorously enough in our compartment. It became increasingly certain that Haide', low-class, commonplace, ignorant girl that she was, had somehow been sucked into a stupendous maelstrom of truth.

The normal actions and reactions of the mind and the body are simply so many stupid veils upon the face of Isis.

What happened to them didn't matter. The stunt was to find some trick to make them shut up.

I understood the value of words. It depended, not on their rational meaning, but upon their hieratic suggestion.

"In Xanadu did Kubla Khan A stately pleasure-house decree."

The names mean nothing definite, but they determine the atmosphere of the poem. Sublimity depends upon unintelliaibility.

I understood the rapture of the names in Lord Dunsany's stories. I understood how the " barbarous names of evocation " used by magicians, the bellowings and whistlings of the Gnostics, the Mantras of Hindoo devotees, set their souls spinning till they became giddy with glory.

Even the names of the places that we were passing in the train excited me just as far as they were unfamiliar and sonorous.

I became increasingly excited by the sight of the Italian words, " E pericoloso sporgersi." That wouldn't mean much, no doubt, to any one who spoke Italian. To me, it was a master-key of magic. I connected it somehow with my love for Lou. Everything was a symbol of my love for Lou except when that idiotic nuisance, knowledge, declared the contrary.

We were whirling in this tremendous trance all the morning. There kept on coming into my mind the title of a picture I had once seen by some crazy modern painter: "Four red monks carrying a black goat across the snow to Nowhere."

It was obviously an excuse for a scheme of colour but the fantastic imbecility of the phrase, and the subtle suggestion of sinister wickedness, made me pant with suppressed exaltation.

The " first call for lunch " came with startling suddenness. I woke up wildly to recognise the fact that Lou and I had not spoken to each other for hours, that we had been rushing through a Universe of our own creation with stupendous speed and diabolical delight. And at the same time I realised that we had been automatically " coking up " without knowing that we were doing so.

The material world had become of so little importance that I no longer knew where I was. I completely mixed up my present journey with memories of two or three previous Continental excursions.

It was the first time tliat Lou had ever been farther than Paris, and she looked to me for information as to time and place. With her, familiarity had not bred contempt, and I found myself unable to tell her the most ordinary things about the journey. I didn't even know in which direction we were travelling, whether the Alps came next, or which tunnel we were taking ; whether we passed through Florence, or the difference between Geneva and Genoa.

Those who are familiar with the route will realise how hopelessly my mind was entangled. I hardly knew morning from evening. I have described things with absolute confidence which could not possibly have taken place.

We kept on getting up and looking at the map on the panels of the corridor, and I couldn't make out where we were. We compared times and distances only to make confusion worse confounded.

I went into the most obstruse astronomical calculations as to whether we ought to put our watches on an hour or back an hour at the frontier ; and I don't know to this day whether I came to any correct conclusion. I had an even chance of being right; but there it stopped.

I remember getting out to stretch our legs at Rome, and that we had a mad impulse to try to see the sights during the twenty minutes or so we had to wait.

I might have done it ; but on the platform at Rome I was brought up with a shock. An impossible thing had happened.

"Great Scot," cried a voice from the window of a coach three ahead of our own. Of all the extraordinary coincidences I How are you

We looked up, hardly able to believe our ears. Who should it be but our friend Feccles !

Well, of course, I'd rather have seen the devil himself. After all, I'd behaved to the man rather shabbily; and, incidentally, made a great fool of myself. But what surprised me on second glance was that he was travelling very much incognito. He was hardly recognisable.

I don't think I mentioned he had fair hair with a bald patch, and was clean shaven. But now his hair was dark ; and a toupde silently rebuked Nature's inclemency. A small black moustache and imperial completed the disguise. But in addition, his manner of dressing was a camouflage in itself. In Paris he had been dressed very correctly. He might have been a man about town of very good family.

But now he was dressed like a courier, or possibly a high-class commercial traveller. His smartness had an element of commonness very well marked. I instinctively knew that he would prefer me not to mention his name.

At this moment the train began to move, and we had to hop on. We went at once to his compartment. It was a coupe', and he was its sole occupant.

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 coupe' 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 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 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 Do other place in Europe had anything to compare with it.