I was beginning to wonder if we hadn’t better tell him the truth and let him be the “best man,” but when I stopped to think it over carefully, I concluded that this would be most inadvisable. I had to travel with him for months yet and besides when he got drunk he might tell anything he happened to remember.... The game went on.
But no results, nor indications of success, rewarded our efforts. We plied him with drinks, and it seemed that the more we gave him the more sober he grew: it was just one of those nights in his life when he could have drunk every variety and vintage of wine, champagne, cognac, rum and gin, and still have stayed on his feet with an air of mastery. He simply defied our dreams of wedded bliss, and as the hours moved slowly by us, my dreams began to tumble into nothingness.
At one place he decided that I was entirely too sober for the party and insisted that I join them in at least one good drink “just to please the nice lady”—meaning Clark. I couldn’t escape it, so I drank.
Now, I’d never tasted cognac straight except down there at St. Nazaire, when I did succeed in downing a few glasses of it, so it wasn’t any wonder to me that I choked and coughed and sputtered when that red hot bolt of liquid lightning hit my throat.... Ben socked me on the back so hard that I sprawled right across the table—but it did cure the choking, because it knocked the wind completely out of me.
Clark put his arm around me, dried my eyes with his handkerchief and caressed me until I regained my breath.
Ben looked on in dumb wonder and finally exclaimed. “That’s a fine way fer an officer to be treatin’ an inferior!... Why don’t ya give her yer smellin salts?”
“You big dumb-bell!” Clark told him. “You knocked the wind out of him!... And no more of your wise cracks.”
But Ben was beginning to feel unconquerable. “You two soul-mates!” he bawled at us. “’Sgood thing yer in those women’s dud er somebody’d think the both of ya’re queer!”
“Shut up and have another drink,” suggested Clark. “Will ya join me, Leony?” he asked.
“No, thanks—I can’t stand that stuff.”