Conspiracy (England)/Chapter 1

EALIZATION that his yacht, the Voyageur, was no longer under way, was the first definite impression to register on Martin Wingate's tortured senses as he awoke that April morning.

From the berth in his wonderfully appointed little cabin, he blinked with drug-dulled eyes of annoyance. The millionaire's tousled hair—already graying, in spite of the fact that Wingate was hardly thirty-eight—his sunken and yellowed cheeks and deep-lined forehead, made him no attractive picture. The sleeves of his pongee pyjamas, pushed back, revealed arms shrunken and nerveless. As, with an effort, he slid out of the berth and stood up, a more repellent-looking individual it would have been hard to fancy.

Dazed by his sudden awakening, puzzled by the hot silence in place of the sea breeze and the pulsing throb of the Voyageur's engine that he had expected to sense, the financier slammed back the latticed blind of his cabin window, and spitefully squinted out into the cutting Southern sunshine.

That sunshine grievously hurt his eyes; for the pupils were dilated to an unnatural degree, by reason of his having had no morphine in nearly eight hours. Not at all understanding where the yacht might be, or why, he perceived, as in a kind of blur, a cove of luminous turquoise waters, cut by the swift, triangular fin of a shark; a curving beach of purest white; dunes sparsely overgrown with coarse grass and topped with ragged palmettos.

Wingate swore dully, and for a minute remained there at the window, trying in vain to grasp the meaning of this unexpected sight.

“What the devil are we tied up here for?” he grumbled, in the most poisonous of evil tempers.

Urgently he craved to feel the refreshment of an ocean wind, to hear the swish and murmur of soothing waves along his yacht's hull. This dead and waiting calm disconcerted and angered him. With the petulance of the drug addict—the most splenetic type of humanity—he felt a grievance against the entire universe.

“This is a hell of a place to stop!” he snarled.

He stood there for a suffering moment. Then he whacked the shutter back again, turned, and groped for the little medicine cabinet over his lavabo. Morphine! He must have morphine, at once! Without at least one tablet he felt that he could not live.

Who, seeing him thus, could have recognized in him the jovial, hail-fellow Wingate of university days—the Wingate who had won his college “letter,” rowed bow on the 'varsity crew, and finished second in the intercollegiate Marathon of 1906? In all justice, that he had come to his present low estate was no fault of his. It was one of the incalculable aftermaths of the war. A broken thigh when his bombing plane had crashed at Monchy-le-Preux, a long siege of military hospital, where overdriven doctors had given morphine as the easiest and perhaps the only feasible way, and then the sinking in of the talons of the cruelest harpy that has ever tormented mankind—such had been his story. A few worthless “cures” had always been negatived by venal orderlies and nurses in sanitariums, always rendered futile by his money power when the “yen” pangs had torn too deep for human endurance. And now—

Now, for all his money, Martin Wingate stood like a fretful, miserable child, pawing in his little medicine cabinet for the phial that alone spelled surcease from misery intolerable—the phial that alone could give him strength to live even a single other day.

He fumbled, groped, and found nothing. He mouthed a curse. The little phial of tablets that meant more than life to him was gone.

For a moment, his mind blurred with confusion and suffering, Wingate stood there on the cabin rug. Barefooted, disheveled, and unlovely, he looked anything but a powerful financier, one of the biggest copper men in the world.

Is not morphine the great democratizer? Before its sovereign power do not plutocrat and slum rat, gently bred woman and slattern of the streets, all bow with equally servile adoration? In the realm of King Morphine there are—at a pinch—no gradations of pride, only degrees of suffering and abasement.

“Where the Hades?” the millionaire growled, his thin hand trembling as it made fruitless search. “I thought it was right here. Thought I left it here last night!”

But no—the all-precious, the indispensable phial still eluded his shaking fingers,

He turned, then, snapped a switch, and flooded the luxurious little cabin with softened electric light. A wondrous cabin, that, oak-paneled, with a writing desk, an easy chair, and silk curtains—a place of luxury strangely dissonant with the suffering of its owner. The light revealed only too clearly that the phial no longer stood where he believed he had put it when, last night, he had taken his last tablet.

Not in the least understanding where it might have gone, Wingate blinked vacantly. He bent his gaze on the floor, saw nothing there, and stood gaping, incredulous. He fingered his unshaven chin—for latterly he had lapsed into somewhat careless ways—and tried to think.

In his mind there rose a nebulous fear lest he might have fallen victim to some sort of terrifying sleepwalking—lest, driven by subconscious memories of old-time battles against the drug, he might have got up in the night and pitched the phial overboard through the cabin window.

“Lord, if I've done that!” he quavered hoarsely, well knowing what hours of incredible torment might be facing him before the yacht could put back to Queensport, where he could bribe some crooked doctor to give him another lot.

Then, as he stood shaking and horrified, all at once a beatific thought surged across his tormented brain—the thought of his extra supply! His reserve, the emergency ration he always carried, in case of trouble!

Since to those unfortunate victims of circumstance whom the thoughtless call “dope fiends” the one supreme business of life is the maintenance of their supply of the precious drug, Wingate, like many another, always kept a secret reserve, never to be touched save in cases of extreme urgency. Now this urgency lay heavy upon him.

He fumbled some keys from the pocket of his white flannel trousers, which hung on a hook. Then he knelt tremulously and opened one of the two lockers under his berth. His questing hand plunged in, and, at the place where it should have encountered a small tin box—it met vacancy.

Uttering a groan that was half a curse, the millionaire crouched stricken and irresolute, miserable as any slumster deprived of his “shot.”

He had awakened late, and had already gone more than two hours past his accustomed time for the morning tablet. No chronometer keeps more accurate time than does the nervous system of an addict, when awake. At certain specified intervals the drug must be taken, or misery results. Wingate was suffering that misery now, and every moment it was growing more acute.

“Damnation!” he chattered, his every nerve racked and twisted with pain. “It's here! It must be here, somewhere!”

Feverishly he began to hunt, pawing out a raffle of inconsequent things and throwing them pell-mell. Among them was a silver frame, containing the photograph of Constance, his wife, and of Hugh, his son. Once—in their absence—he would have kept that photograph on the desk in his cabin. Once it would have been his most precious treasure; but now he had tossed it into the locker as a thing indifferent, almost hateful—as a reproach that shamed and humbled him.

The silver frame stuck among some other things in the locker. He gave it an ugly wrench that bent it, and flung it with an oath to the floor. Broken glass littered the rug.

In panic haste Wingate emptied the first locker, and then the other. His cabin floor grew chaotic with a mass of impedimenta. He dug among these things, ripping papers, tearing cardboard boxes, throwing stuff about like the very madman he was becoming. An enormous and intolerable panic drove him with scorpion lashes. This, this was fear!

Wingate had never really feared the “cures.” He had always known that when the agony of abstinence should become too dreadful, he could surreptitiously buy morphine. In earlier days he had not feared flying over the German lines. Peril of war had been to him a wondrous kind of sport. He had never feared business rivals. To strive with them and beat them had been his play. Life, the world, death had never inspired any terrors. All these years past, his every fear had centered in the possibility that at some time, through some unforeseen event, he might be cut away from his god, morphia.

And now that hour was at hand.

Like a creature possessed, he searched his cabin. Again and again, to wearisome iteration, he fumbled over the same fruitless packages. He cut his hand on a jagged splinter of broken glass, but gave no heed to that. Slow, sullen blood stained everything he touched. No matter!

He emptied every drawer in his desk, turned all his pockets inside out, and crawled and fumbled in obscure corners, cursing, mouthing. He was a pitiable, unmanly figure, such as only a drug slave can be—a figure such as to make one shudder away, ashamed of humanity and of all its vaunted strength.

At last, convinced against his will that every grain of his vitally essential drug was really gone—though how this amazing thing could have happened escaped all comprehension of his pain-fogged mind—he abandoned the useless and degrading search. He crouched in his desk chair, shaking, beaten, done, wrenched with torment and terror.

Then, of a sudden, he forced himself to a desperate calm. He began jamming the litter into the lockers under the berth, hit or miss. When he laid hands on the picture of Constance and Hugh, he crammed it back along with everything else, unheeding the silent appeal of the eyes that looked at him from the bent and ravaged frame.

At last, all the things stowed away, he crowded the lockers shut, locked them, and gave some semblance of order to the cabin. Unsteadily he groped for the push button.

“Back to Queensport, as fast as the engines will drive her!” he muttered. “But God knows where we are, or what's happened, or how long it 'll take to get back!”

Shuddering, twitching, he slumped into his easy-chair by the desk, and beat the knuckles of one fist into the other palm.

“God knows, God knows! I'm in for hell, all right—perhaps for death!”