“Not much taste,” I remarked.
“Wonderful stuff,” he replied. “I believe in it absolutely. It’s good for other things, too; it made me sleep like a top, and I had the appetite of a horse for breakfast. That chemist’ll make his fortune when he brings it out. People will pay a pound a bottle, lots of ’em.”
At Newhaven the sea was agitated—hideously so; even in the harbour the steamers rose and fell absurdly. Not all the fresh, salt winds in the world, nor all the jolly sunshine and sparkling waves, nor all that strong beauty that comes with the first glimpse of the sea and long horizons, could lessen the sinking dread that was in my—my heart. Truth to tell, I had no more belief in the elixir than if it had been chopped hay and treacle.
My friend, however, was confidence personified. “The fact is,” he said, laughing at the wind and sea, “the real fact is I believe in that chemist. He told me this stuff was infallible; and I believe it is. The trouble with you is funk—sheer blue funk.”
We stuck to our guns and swallowed the last prescribed dose just before the syren announced our departure—and fifteen minutes later....
It was a degrading three hours; and the sting of it was that my friend, with a hideous cap tied down about his ears, a smile that was in the worst possible taste, and a jaunty confidence that was even more insulting than he intended it to be, walked up and down that loathsome, sliding, switchback deck the entire way. Not the entire way, though, for half-way across he disappeared into the dining-room, and returned in due course with that brown beard of his charged with bread-crumbs, and between his lips actually—a pipe. And, without so much as speaking to me, he paced to and fro before my chair, when a little of that imagination he put so delightfully into his books would have led him discreetly to pace the other deck where I could not see him. I thought out endless revenges, but the fact was I never had time to think out any single revenge properly to its conclusion. Something—something unspeakably vile—always came to interfere; and the sight of my friend, balancing up and down the rolling deck chatting to sailors, admiring the sea and sky, and puffing hard at his pipe all the time, was, I think, the most abominable thing I have ever seen.
“Simply marvellous, I call it,” he told me in the douane at Dieppe. “The stuff is a revolutionary discovery. It’s the first time I ever ate a meal on a steamer in my life. Sorry you suffered so. Can’t understand it,” he added, with a complacency that was insufferable. I was positively delighted to see the Customs officer open all his bags and litter his things about in glorious confusion....
In Paris that night our little hotel was rather full, and we had to share a big two-bedded room. My friend groaned a good deal between two and three in the morning and kept me awake; and once, somewhere about five a.m., I saw him with a lighted candle fumbling at the table among a lot of little white paper packages which I recognised as his purchases from that criminal London chemist who had concocted the seasick cure.
It was at nine o’clock, however, while he was down at his bath, that I noticed something on the table by his bed that instantly arrested my attention. Regardless of morals, I investigated. It was unmistakable. It was his own bottle of the seasick cure. He had never taken it at all!
Then, just as his step sounded in the passage, it flashed across me. He had made one of his usual muddles. He had mistaken the bottle. He had swallowed the contents of some other phial instead.