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. THE DIVIDED KINGDOM It was like Hoyting to be lying up for repairs in Soerabaya when the Dorriens drifted by; like him to be there at the psychologic moment; like him, above all, not to follow up their trail for a solution, but to tack off into the China Sea to renew his acquaintance with belligerent Mongols. It was I, years later, at Marseilles, who supplied Hoyting with the last act of the play; and I can see his gray eyes narrowing above his glass of vermouth as, for once, he listened. I shall have to put it together as best I can, though I shall, as best I can, put Hoyting’s part of it in his own mouth. I’ve learned a kind of mental stenography by dint of listening to him; and though it’s unfair to quote a man inexactly, I’m not sure it isn’t less unfair than inditing Hoyting’s jerks and pauses, his zigzag structure. Some of the story, as I say, he got from me. That part--most of it--I’ll give you in the beginning. After that, if only for the sake of one or two of his own phrases, I shall make shift to let him talk as he talked to me. If I could reproduce for you that evening at Marseilles--Hoyting, his arms folded on the café table, paying out his story unevenly, as if in response to unseen strains and unseen relaxations at the other end--oh, as if Dorrien himself had been fitfully pulling and letting go; and then the sharpening of the eyes, the shrug of the great shoulders, when I told him the end--if I could, I might let it go at that. But you who know Hoyting will know that I had to shape it; and you who don’t might loathe the imperfectly visualized scene.