Maiden Voyages

by Mary Morris

“No. I’m so interested.”

  “Would you like to try it?”

  “Oh, yes.”

  Nobody protested, or acted shocked or anything. In fact, nobody but Hua-ching paid any attention. At Heh-ven’s request, he smoked a pipe to demonstrate how it was done, then relaxed against the pillows for a few minutes. “If you get up immediately, you are dizzy,” explained Heh-ven. I observed his technique carefully and, by the time I took my place on the couch, had a reasonable notion of how it was done. You sucked in as deeply as possible, and held the smoke there as long as you could before exhaling. Remembering that I’d never been able to inhale cigarette smoke, I was worried that the world of the opium addict might be closed to me. In daydreams, as in night dreams, one doesn’t take into account the real self and the failings of the flesh. The romantic is always being confronted by this dilemma, but that night I was spared it. When I breathed in I felt almost sick, but my throat didn’t close, and after a moment I was fine. I couldn’t dispose of the tiny volcano all in one mighty pull, as the others had done, but for a beginner I didn’t do badly—not at all. Absorbed in the triumph of not coughing, I failed to take notice of the first effects, and even started to stand up, but Heh-ven told me not to. “Just stay quiet and let’s talk,” he suggested.

  We all talked—about books, and books, and Chinese politics. That I knew nothing about politics didn’t put me off in the least. I listened with keen interest to everything the others had to say in English, and when they branched off into Chinese I didn’t mind. It left me to my thoughts. I wouldn’t have minded anything. The world was fascinating and benevolent as I lay there against the cushions, watching Heh-ven rolling pipes for himself. Pipes—that’s what they called the little cones as well as the tube, I suppose because it is easier to say than pipefuls. Anyway, the word “pipeful” is not really accurate, either. Only once, when Hua-ching asked me how I was, did I recollect the full significance of the situation. Good heavens, I was smoking opium! It was hard to believe, especially as I didn’t seem to be any different.

  “I don’t feel a thing,” I told him. “I mean, I’m enjoying myself with all of you, of course, but I don’t feel any different. Perhaps opium has no effect on me?”

  Heh-ven pulled at the tiny beard he wore and smiled slightly. He said, “Look at your watch.” I cried out in surprise; it was three o’clock in the morning.

  “Well, there it is,” Heh-ven said. “And you have stayed in one position for several hours, you know—you haven’t moved your arms or your head. That’s opium. We call it Ta Yen, the Big Smoke.”

  “But it was only one pipe I had. And look at you, you’ve smoked four or five, but you’re still all right.”

  “That’s opium, too,” said Heh-ven cryptically.

  Some weeks later, I got sick. I must have smoked too much. In a relatively mild case of overindulgence, one merely gets nightmares, but this wasn’t mild. I vomited on the way home from Heh-ven’s, and went on doing it when I got in, until the houseboy called the doctor. This doctor was an American who had worked for years in the community, but I didn’t know him well. Of course, I had no intention of telling him what might be wrong, and I was silent as he felt my pulse and looked at my tongue and took my temperature. Finally, he delivered judgement. “Jaundice. Haven’t you noticed that you’re yellow?”

  “No.”

  “Well, you are—yellow as an orange,” he said. “How many pipes do you smoke in a day?”

  I was startled, but if he could play it calm, so could I. “Oh, ten, eleven, something like that,” I said airily, and he nodded and wrote out a prescription, and left. No lecture, no phone call to the police, nothing. I ought to have appreciated his forbearance, but I was angry, and said to Heh-ven next day, “He doesn’t know as much as he thinks he does. People don’t count pipes—one man’s pipe might make two of another’s.” The truth was that I resented the doctor’s having stuck his foot in the door of my exclusive domain.

  All in all, if I’d been asked how I was faring I would have said I was gettng on fine. I had no desire to change the way I was living. Except for the doctor, foreign outsiders didn’t seem to guess about me; they must have thought I looked sallow, and certainly they would have put me down as absentminded, but nobody guessed. The Chinese, of course, were different, because they’d seen it all before. I annoyed one or two people, but I managed to pass, especially when the war between China and Japan flared up just outside the foreign-occupied part of the city. Shells fell all around our little island of safety, and sometimes missed their mark and bounced inside it. It is no wonder that the American doctor didn’t take any steps about me—he had a lot of other things to occupy his mind. The war didn’t bother me too much. I soon got used to the idea of it. Opium went up in price—that was all that mattered.

  But the war cut me off definitely from the old world, and so, little by little, I stopped caring who knew or didn’t know. People who came calling, even when they weren’t smokers, were shown straight into the room where I smoked. I now behaved very much like Heh-ven; there was even an oily smudge on my left forefinger, like the one on his, that wouldn’t easily wash off. It came from testing opium pellets as they cooled. Heh-ven, amused by the smudge, used to call the attention of friends to it. “Look,” he would say, “Have you ever before seen a white girl with that mark on her finger?”

  I wasn’t the only foreign opium smoker in Shanghai. Apart from Jan, there were several others I knew. One was connected with the French diplomatic service. He and his wife had picked up their habit in Indo-China. It was through them that I met Bobby—a German refugee, a doctor who had built up enough of a practice in Shanghai to live on it. He wasn’t an addict—I don’t think I ever saw him touch a pipe—but he seemed to spend a lot of time with addicts. Sometimes I wondered why he dropped in at Heh-ven’s so often. I rather wished he wouldn’t, because he was dull. Still, it didn’t matter much whether outsiders were dull or bright, and as he happened to call on me one afternoon when I had received a shattering letter, I confided in him.

  “It’s about this silly magazine I’ve been publishing,” I said. “They want to expand its circulation—the people who own it, that is—and they say I’ve got to go to Chungking to talk to them.”

  “And you can’t go, of course,” said Bobby.

  “I can, too.” I lifted myself up on my elbow and spoke indignantly. “Certainly I can go. What do you mean, I can’t? Only, it’s a bother.” I lay down again and started rolling a pellet fast. My mind buzzed with all the things that would have to be done—arranging about my house, getting a permit to travel. And I’d have to go through Hong Kong, taking a boat down there and then flying inland. It was tiring just to think about it, and here was Bobby talking again.

  “Listen to me. Listen carefully. You can’t do it—you can’t.”

  This time he managed to worry me. “Why not?”

  “Because of the opium. Your habit,” said Bobby.

  I laughed. “Oh, that’s what it is, is it? No, that’ll be all right.”

  The pellet was ready, shaped into a cone, and I smoked it, then said, “I can stop whenever I want to. You don’t know me well, but I assure you I can stop any time.”

  “How recently have you tried?” he demanded, and paused. I didn’t reply because I was trying to reckon it. He went on, “It’s been some time, I’m sure. I’ve known you myself for a year, and you’ve never stopped during that period. I think you’ll find you can’t do it, young lady.”

  “You’re wrong,” I said violently. “I tell you, you’re all wrong—you don’t know me.”

  “And in the interior it’s not so funny if you’re caught using it, you know. If you’re caught, you know what happens.” He sliced a stiff hand across his throat. He meant that the Kuomintang had put a new law into effect; people they caught smoking were to be decapitated. But surely that couldn’t happen to me.

  I looked at him with new uncertainty and said, “What will I do?”

  �
�You’ll be all right, because I can help you,” said Bobby, all of a sudden brisk and cheerful. “You can be cured quite easily. Have you heard of hypnosis?”

  I said that of course I’d heard of it, and even witnessed it. “There was a medical student at school who put people to sleep—just made them stare at a light bulb and told them they were sleepy.”

  Bobby made a call on my telephone, talking in German. He hung up and said, “We start tomorrow morning. I have a bed for you at my little hospital—a private ward, no less. Get up early if you can and do what you usually do in the morning—smoke if you like, I have no objections—but be there at nine o’clock. I’ll write down the directions for the taxi-driver.” He did so. Then, at the door, he added, “Heh-ven will try to talk you out of it, you know. Don’t let him.”

  I said, “Oh no, Bobby, he wouldn’t do that. This is my own affair, and he’d never interfere.”

  “Just don’t let him, that’s all. Don’t forget a suitcase with your night things. You’ll probably bring some opium pills, but if you do I’ll find them, so save yourself the trouble.”

  Before I became an addict, I used to think that a confirmed smoker would be frantically afraid of the idea of breaking off. Actually, it isn’t like that—or wasn’t with me. At a certain stage, a smoker is cheerfully ready to accept almost any suggestion, including the one of breaking off. Stop smoking? Why, of course, he will say—what a good idea! Let’s start tomorrow. After a couple of pipes I was very pleased about it, and rang up Heh-ven to tell him. He, too, was pleased, but couldn’t see why I was in such a hurry.

  “Oh, wonderful!” he said. “But why tomorrow? If you wait, we can do it together. It’s always easier with somebody else. Wait, and I’ll ask Bobby to fix me up, too.”

  “I’d like to, Heh-ven, but he’s got everything arranged for me at the hospital, and I can hardly change things around now. And, as he said, I haven’t got much time—only a couple of weeks before I have to go to Chungking. It’ll be easier when your turn comes.”

  The high sweetness in his voice when he replied was significant, I knew, of anger. “Of course, since you are so happy to take the advice of a man you hardly know …”

  It was a struggle, but I hadn’t given in by the time I hung up. Full of opium or not, I knew all too well what would happen if I consented to wait for Heh-ven for anything at all—a tea party or a cure. He’d put it off and put it off until it was forgotten. I shrugged, and had another pipe, and next morning I almost overslept, but didn’t. The old man who took care of the house carried my bag out to the taxi, talking to himself, and stood there as I climbed in, a worried look on his face. He didn’t trust anything about the project. “I come see you soon,” he promised.

  I had never heard of Bobby’s hospital. We drove a long way through the shops and hovels that ringed the foreign town, so that I half expected we would enter the Japanese lines, but before we got that far we found it—a building about as big as most middle-class Shanghai houses and only a little shabbier. Over the entrance hung a dirty white flag and a red cross on it. Bobby was at the door, his teeth gleaming in a relieved smile, his spectacles flashing in the morning sun. Clearly, he hadn’t been quite sure I would turn up, and he asked how Heh-ven had taken the news.

  “He wants you to fix him up, too—someday,” I told him.

  “Whenever he’s ready. Come in here. The nurse will look after your suitcase.”

  I followed him to a flimsily walled office filled with, among other things, filing cases, a heavy old desk, and one overstuffed chair, in which he told me to sit. He gave me a pill, and a tin cup of water to help it down. I stared around curiously. There were cardboard boxes piled against the walls, and an instrument cabinet. A patch of sunlight lay on the floor matting. The room was very hot. Sweat rolled down Bobby’s face. Though smokers have little sense of smell, I could distinguish a reek of disinfectant. I asked what kind of cases the hospital cared for, and Bobby said it took in everything. He spoke absently, pacing up and down, waiting for the pill to work on me.

  I said, “I don’t see why you need to use a pill. The medical student just used a light bulb.”

  “Oh, I could do that, too, but it takes too long,” Bobby retorted. “In the future, I want to cure whole roomfuls of addicts all at once, hypnotizing them in groups, and how far do you think I’d get if I tried to put each one under by making him stare at a light? No, barbiturates are quicker. Aren’t you sleepy yet?”

  “No. Why roomfuls of addicts?”

  He explained. There were far too many for one man to cope with unless he employed such methods. In fact, he said, my case was being used to that end. If it worked—and it was going to work, it was bound to work, he assured me—he wanted me to exert all the influence I might have to persuade the authorities involved to hire him as a kind of National Grand Curer-in-Chief of opium addiction. He talked warmly and hopefully of these plans, until as through a glass brightly, I saw a schoolroom full of white-clad Chinese, row on row, all exactly alike, with their faces lifted toward Bobby on a very high dais. He was saying … was …

  “Will you permit me, while you are under, to make a little psychoanalysis also?” He really was saying it, and to me, not to the white-clad Chinese.

  I stirred, and forced my tongue to answer. “Yes, if you’ll promise to tell me all about it afterward. Do you promise?”

  “Yes, yes.” He was pacing again, and said it impatiently, over his shoulder. “You are now getting sleepy. You will sleep. In a few minutes.…”

  It was less than a few mintues, however, before I felt fully awake again, and sat up, saying in triumph, “Your pill didn’t work.”

  Bobby, still pacing, was now rubbing his hands, saying over and over, as if to himself, “Very interesting, ve-ry interesting.”

  Suddenly the room had become dark again. I said, “It didn’t work,” and now I felt disappointed. All those preparations had been wasted. Bobby came to a halt in front of me.

  “Do you know what time it is?” he asked. Once long ago, I dimly recollected, Heh-ven had asked the same question. But Bobby answered himself. “It’s five o’clock in the afternoon, and you went under before ten this morning.”

  “But what’s been going on?” I rubbed my forehead.

  “You’ve been talking almost the whole time. I stopped for lunch.”

  I was staggered, but Bobby gave me no time to discuss the strangeness of the situation. He looked at me intently and said, “Do you feel any desire to smoke?”

  I shook my head. It was true that the picture of the tray and the lighted lamp was no longer there in the middle of my mind. His question, in fact, surprised me. Why should I want to smoke?

  “You have no wish, no thought of wanting it?” he insisted, and again I shook my head.

  Bobby said, “Good. You will go to bed now, and eat something if you like. For tomorrow I’ve given orders that you’re not to have visitors. That will be best for a little, but I’ll be coming in later tonight to check up.”

  I started to stand, but paused as a sneeze overtook me. “I’ve caught cold,” I declared. “Oh, Bobby—the analysis. What did you find out?”

  “You are very interesting,” he said enthusiastically. “Here is Nurse Wong to take care of you.” He walked out.

  Nurse Wong led me down the passage as fussily as a tug conveying a liner to its berth. She showed me into a first-floor room with an army cot in it, with whitewashed walls and a French window looking out on a wildly overgrown garden. The bed linen was worn and stained with rust. Nurse Wong had already unpacked my things and hung them on a couple of nails stuck in the wall. Of course, I thought drowsily after I got into bed, Chinese don’t hang up their clothes but fold them away in boxes … Later, a supper tray lay on my chest. I had no desire to eat the rice covered with brown goo, and after a while it was taken away. Bobby must have come in that night, but I don’t remember him. There was no reason why I should have been so sleepy, I told myself when I woke up in the small
hours. I wasn’t any longer. I was uncomfortable, though I couldn’t say just where the discomfort was. Throat? Arms? Legs? Stomach? It wandered about. The only place it seemed to settle for good was in the conscience. I felt very guilty about everything in the world, but it was not agony. It was supportable. Still, I was glad when the sun rose. Jan had once expressed the feeling of opium very well, I reminded myself; he had a bad leg, and after he’d smoked a pipe or two he’d said, “The pain is still there, but it no longer hurts.” Well, I said to myself, that’s what’s happening. The pain has always been there, and now it hurts agains. That is all. It is supportable. It is supportable.

  One thing helped a lot. Never through the week that was worst did I have the thought that I would feel a lot better if only I could get to a pipe. That was where the hypnotism came in, I realized. Knowing it, however, didn’t spoil the effect. It worked. I wasn’t locked in my room, and there was no guard at the front door. If I’d wanted to, I could have dressed and walked out and gone home, or to Heh-ven’s, but I didn’t want to. Of all my urges, that one was missing. I counted the days after which Bobby said I would feel better. I fidgeted and yawned and sneezed, and my eyes wept torrents, and my watch simply refused to run, but I never tried to get out of the hospital.

  For a while, whenever Bobby came and I tried to talk, my voice quivered and I wept. “Just nerves. I can’t manage words.” I sobbed, but he said I was getting on fine. He added that he realized I really wanted to stop smoking, because I hadn’t brought in any pills. He said he knew that because he’d searched my things while I was hypnotized. The night after he said that, I had cramps. Cramps are a well-known withdrawal symptom. They might make themselves felt anywhere in the addict’s body, but most people get them in the arms—they feel as if all the bones have broken. I had mine in the legs, all the way up to the hips, and at four in the morning I figured out that this was because I’d had to wear braces on my legs as a baby. I had never been able to remember the braces, but now, I said to myself, my legs were remembering. Then, as if I’d pleased the gods with this decision, I actually fell asleep for a full hour. It was probably the worst night of all.