Chalmers leaned back and whistled a bar or two from Rigoletto. Then: “Never marry a Catholic, old man!” he said in his lightest voice. But immediately he bent forward and laid his hand on mine. “You do see why I have to hang on, don’t you?”
I merely compressed my lips tightly, that no word should come.
“After all,” he said, turning his head away, “I should like a chance to get back at Romance, some day. And the time may come—what with spectrum analysis and all.”
I shook my head. “You love the woman still, Chalmers.”
“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.