112 The Diary of a Drug Fiend
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 con-
ceptions 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