CHAPTER XII
My question was answered next evening by Beady Lamont.
Greatly to Lovey’s disgust, I made it a point to attend every Saturday meeting at the club.
“Them low fellas ain’t fit company for you, Slim,” he would protest. “What’s the use of cuttin’ out the booze and bein’ rich if you don’t ’old yer ’ead above the likes o’ that?”
“They’ve been awfully white with us, Lovey.”
“They wasn’t no whiter with us than they’d be with anybody else; and don’t three out o’ every five give ’em the blue Peter?”
But though we had this discussion once a week, he always accompanied me to Vandiver Street, showing his disapproval when he got there in sitting by himself and refusing to respond to advances.
I have to confess that I needed the fellowship of men who had been through the same mill as myself, in order to keep up the fight. Again let me repeat it, I am giving you but a faint idea of the struggle I had to make. No evil habit relinquishes its hold easily, and the one to which I had given myself over is perhaps the most tenacious of all. It would be wearisome if I were to keep telling you how near I came at times to courting the old disaster, and how close the shave by which I sheered away; but I never felt safer than a blind man walking along the edge of a cliff. More than once I tore the blue star from my buttonhole, though on each occasion I juggled myself into putting it back again. I juggled myself as I did on the morning when I gazed at the brown-green water flowing beneath Greeley’s Slip. I said that what I didn’t do to-day I would still be free to do to-morrow, thus tiding myself over the worst minutes, if only by a process of postponement.
But among my brothers at the club I heard so many tales of heroic resistance that I grew ashamed of my periods of weakness. What Pyn and Mouse and the Scotchman and the piano-mover and Beady Lamont could do, I told myself, I also could do. Moreover, new men came in, and more than one of the educated type turned to me for help. To a journalist named Edmonds, and to an actor named Prince, I stood as next friend, and only declined to officiate in the same capacity for Headlights, the big-eyed tailor, and the wee bye Daisy, when they returned, penitent, on the ground that I couldn’t watch over more than two men efficiently. With the actor I had no trouble, but twice I had to go down to Stinson’s and pull Edmonds out of a drunken spell. To keep him out was putting me on all my mettle; and in order to maintain my mettle I had to stay out myself. My courage was no whit nobler than that of the man who would turn tail in the battle if it weren’t for shame before his comrades; but there is something to be got out of even such valor as that.
And in the club I got it. Perhaps we were all putting up a bluff. Perhaps those whom I looked upon as heroes were inwardly no more glorious than I. But when the fellows whom I patted on the back patted me in their turn, I was obliged to live up to their commendation. There came, indeed, a time when I couldn’t help seeing that in the eyes of new-comers especially I was taken as a pillar of the club, and knew that I couldn’t fall without bringing down some of the living walls along with me. To be strong enough to hold up my portion of the weight became once more with me then a question of noblesse oblige.