I
The first thing of which Jerome was conscious was a feeling that the
covers had slid off. They sometimes did, for he was a trifle too long for
his bed and frequently threshed the blankets loose at the foot.
Yes, he dully decided, without yet definitely opening his eyes at all,
that the bed clothes must have slid off onto the floor. He felt chilly,
yet not so chilly as to force him to any really energetic effort toward
a recovery of the obstreperous quilt. He groped futilely about with one
hand, then gave it up. There seemed to be something desperately wrong
with his head. He couldn’t seem to concentrate—no, not even on the quilt.
Some time later he again emerged into a realm of hazy half-consciousness,
and began remembering, very sketchily, the crimson night out of which the
present condition had evolved; saw once more the boisterous gathering
at Girardin’s, with himself in the midst; seemed still to feel Lili
beaming at him in her wonderful way. Then it came to him that he had
finally succumbed to prolonged persuasion and had done his little stunt.
He blushed unhappily and told himself his dignity was now permanently
shattered. How had they managed so to overcome his every better scruple?
Girardin’s—he had lost all count of the number of glasses—everybody so
jolly—Lili—the way she looked at one.... He groaned. Then he remembered
that by now she must be far to sea. What time was it? What time? It
seemed very dusky. He couldn’t hear his alarm clock on the commode. Of
course—it hadn’t been wound. He had gone out and made a night of it, and
his clock had run down.
And then—then he blinked his eyes a little and began, very dully
at first, to establish a groping connection with the objects they
encountered. The particular object which first arrested his attention
was a crack which ran in a perfectly straight line across the ceiling
over his head. It puzzled him, rather, because he couldn’t remember any
such crack as this in his ceiling. There were plenty of cracks, but all
zig-zag. Curious, how he had managed to sleep all these years under a
perfectly straight crack without ever seeing it!
He groaned again and shut his eyes. These puzzling inconsistencies made
his head rock more and more acutely. He tried to turn over and go back to
sleep—tried to put all that was baffling out of his wretched head. But
the one query that now kept at him with dogged persistence was: how did
he ever get to bed without being able to remember a single circumstance
connected with the process?
His next discovery was that he had gone to bed in his clothes. His
hand encountered the clip which still staunchly held his tie in place.
The clip proved beyond possible doubt that he wasn’t in his customary
nightshirt. And then—ah, but then the action seemed speeded up enormously!
His eyes were wide now; he was growing sober by leaps and bounds. There
was the undeviating crack above his head, and six inches to either side
of it were identical cracks. The ceiling wasn’t composed of plaster at
all, but painted boards; and the most staggering thing about it was the
fact that, without even sitting up he could stretch out his hand and
touch it! As a matter of fact, he wasn’t in any actual bed, but on a
shelf underneath a rough board cupboard.
And now, at last, he had reached the inevitable point of exclaiming:
“Where am I?” and sent his leaden feet hurtling through space in the
direction of the floor. He sat for a moment on the edge of the shelf,
holding his vertiginous head in his hands and trying to steady himself to
a facing of whatever ordeal might be in store for him. One awful thought
kept pounding against his feverish temples: “Perhaps I’m in jail!”
Mightn’t the cell of a jail conceivably look like this?
But when he came face to face with a tiny port, his almost entirely
cleared though still very painful brain registered the indisputable fact
that he was at sea.