Out of the sea the wind seemed to answer him. It swept by, laughing.
IX
Ned’s news was received with the keenest delight by Lenore and Mrs. Hardenworth. The latter regained her lost amiability with promptness. Lenore’s reaction was not dissimilar from Ned’s; in her native city she could come into her own again.
The bottles were greeted with shouts of delight. Ned went immediately to the sideboard and procured half a dozen glasses.
“All hands partake to-night,” he explained. “It’s going to be a real party.”
He mixed whiskies-and-sodas for Lenore and Mrs. Hardenworth; then started to make the rounds of the crew with a bottle and glasses. He did not, however, waste time offering any to Bess. The latter had already evinced an innate fear of it, wholly apart from sentimentality and nonsense. She had lived in a circle and environment where strong drink had not been merely a thing to jest over and sing songs about, to drink lightly and receive therefrom pleasant exhilaration; but where it was a living demon, haunting and shadowing every hour. She had no false sophistication—her knowledge of life was all too real—and she had no desire to toy with poison and play with fire. Both were realities to her. She knew that they had blasted life on life, all as sturdy and seemingly as invincible as her own. Her abstinence was not a moral issue with her. It was simply that she knew here was a foe that met men in their pleasant hours, greeted them in friendly ways, and then, by insidious, slow attack, cast them down and left them miserably to die; and she was simply afraid for her life of it. Ned, on the other hand, would have laughed at the thought of its ever mastering him. He felt himself immune from the tragedies that had afflicted other men. It was part of the conceit of his generation.
But Ned found plenty of customers for his whisky. McNab, at the wheel, wished him happy days over two fingers of straight liquor in the glass, and Knutsen, his pale eyes gleaming, poured himself a staggering portion. “Go ahead,” Ned encouraged him when the seaman apologized for his greediness. “The sky’s the limit to-night.” And Forest in the engine room, and Julius in the kitchen absorbed a man’s-size drink with right good will.
Ned was able to make the rounds again before the call for dinner; and the attitude of his guests was changed in but one instance. McNab seemed to be measuring his liquor with exceeding care. He was a man who knew his own limits, and he apparently did not intend to overstep them. He took a small drink, but Knutsen, his superior, consumed as big a portion as before.
It was an elated, spirited trio that sat down at the little table in the saloon. Not one of them could ever remember a happier mood. Julius served the dinner with a flourish; and they had only laughter when a sudden lurch of the craft slid the sugar bowl off the table to the floor.
“Hello, the ship’s drunk too,” Ned commented gaily.