“Not I.” His head-shake was more vehement than mine. “But I want to be
on deck if anything should turn up. I want to see it through. At
least--I can’t quite see that I’ve the right to go out.”
I sighed. Chalmers had always gone his own way; and certainly in this
greatest matter he would be tenacious, if ever. He seemed for the moment
to have forgotten me, and sat once more, his arms folded on the table,
his shoulders hunched, as beneath a burden, in the speckled brown coat,
his head moving slightly from side to side--again fantastically like the
tortoise that bears up the world. I didn’t quite know what to do with
him.
Then a charitable impulse came to me. The bar, I knew, didn’t close
until one. I ordered up a bottle of brandy. When it came I poured out
enough to set the brain of any abstemious man humming. Chalmers was
still staring in front of him at the table. I wanted him to sleep that
night at any cost. Pursuing my impulse, I pushed the glass across to
him. “Here; you’d better take this,” I said. He reached out his hand
mechanically, and mechanically drank. I waited. The stuff had no visible
effect on him. Five minutes later, I repeated the dose. As before, he
obeyed me with a mechanical, an almost mesmerized implicitness. Then I
took him home in a cab and put him to bed. I never told, myself, but it
leaked out--he had such a bad hang-over--and I was much and enviously
congratulated. You see, we had all tried, for five years, to get
Chalmers to take a drink.