He heard the front door-bell ring, and rose from his armchair grudgingly. He had no idea who could be calling on him at that hour; and when he had opened the door and found that there was no one visible outside he was even more annoyed.
He returned to the sitting-room, and gulped down the remainder of his nightcap without noticing the bitter tang that had not been there when he poured it out. The taste came into his mouth after the liquid had been swallowed, and he grimaced. He started to walk towards the door, and the room spun around. He felt himself falling helplessly before he could cry out.
When he woke up, his first impression was that he had been buried alive. He was lying on a hard narrow surface, with one shoulder squeezed up against a wall on his left, and the ceiling seemed to be only a few inches above his head. Then his sight cleared a little, and he made out that he was in a bunk in a tiny unventilated compartment lighted by a single circular window. He struggled up on one elbow, and groaned. His head was one reeling whirligig of aches, and he felt horribly sick.
Painfully he forced his mind back to his last period of consciousness. He remembered pouring out that last whisky-and-soda — the ring at the front door — the bitter taste in the glass… Then nothing but an infinity of empty blackness… How long had he been unconscious? A day? Two days? A week? He had no means of telling.
With an agonizing effort he dragged himself off the bunk and staggered across the floor. It reared and swayed sickeningly under him, so that he could scarcely keep his balance. His stomach was somersaulting nauseatingly inside him. Somehow he got over to the one window, the pane was frosted over, but outside he could hear the splash of water and the shriek of wind. The explanation dawned on him dully — he was in a ship.
Mr. Croon's knees gave way under him, and he sank moaning to the floor. A spasm of sickness left him gasping in a clammy sweat. The air was stiflingly close, and there was a smell of oil in it which made it almost unbreathable. Stupidly, unbelievingly, he felt the floor vibrating to the distant rhythm of the engines. A ship! He'd been drugged — kidnapped — shanghaied! Even while he tried to convince himself that it could not be true, the floor heaved up again with the awful deliberateness of a seventh wave; and Mr. Croon heaved up with it…
He never knew how he managed to crawl to the door between the paroxysms of torment that racked him with every movement of the vessel. After what seemed like hours he reached it, and found strength to try the handle. The door failed to budge. It was locked. He was a prisoner — and he was going to die. If he could have opened the door he would have crawled up to the deck and thrown himself into the sea. It would have been better than dying of that dreadful nausea that racked his whole body and made his head swim as if it were being spun on the axle of a dynamo.
He rolled on the floor and sobbed with helpless misery. In another hour of that weather he'd be dead. If he could have found a weapon he would have killed himself. He had never been able to stand the slightest movement of the water — and now he was a prisoner in a ship that must have been riding one of the worst storms in the history of navigation. The hopelessness of his position made him scream suddenly — scream like a trapped hare — before the ship slumped suckingly down into the trough of another seventh wave and left his stomach on the crest of it.
Minutes later — it seemed like centuries — a key turned in the locked door, and a man came in. Through the bilious yellow mists that swirled over his eyes, Mr. Croon saw that he was tall and wiry, with a salt-tanned face and far-sighted twinkling blue eyes. His double-breasted jacket carried lines of dingy gold braid, and he balanced himself easily against the rolling of the vessel.
"Why, Mr. Croon — what's the matter?"