When Coningsby, who seated himself between us, had shaken hands and made some kindly observation, Lovey replied, peevishly:
“I ain’t in ’ere for nothink but to save Slim.”
“That’s what the boys call me,” I laughed, in explanation.
Coningsby having duly commended this piece of self-sacrifice, we went on with the reminiscences with which we had begun. It was the most ordinary kind of breaking the ice between one man and another; but for me the wonder of it was precisely in that fact. You have to be down and out to know what it means when some one treats you as if you had never been anything but up and in. There was not a shade in Coningsby’s manner, nor an inflection in his tone, to hint at the fact that we hadn’t met at the New Netherlands or any other first-class club. It was nothing, you will say, but what any gentleman would be impelled to. Quite true! But again let me say it, you would have to be in my place to know what it means to be face to face with the man who is impelled to it.
We stopped talking, of course, when business began, Coningsby giving me any necessary explanations in an undertone, and pointing out the notables whom I didn’t already know by sight.
One of these was Colonel Straight, who with Andrew Christian had founded the club. I don’t believe that he had ever been a colonel, but he looked like one; neither can I swear that his real name was Straight, though it suited him. In our world the sobriquet often clings closer to us, and fits us more exactly, than anything given by inheritance or baptism. Here was a man with a figure as straight as an arrow and a glance as straight as a sunbeam. What else could his name have been? With one leg slightly shorter than the other, as if he had been wounded in battle, a magnificent white mustache, a magnificent fleece of white hair—he had all the air not only of an old soldier, but of an old soldier in high command.
“You wouldn’t think, to look at him,” Coningsby whispered, “that he’s only an old salesman for ready-made clothes.”
“No; he ought to be at the head of a regiment.”
“But the odd thing I notice about this club is that a man’s status and occupation in the world outside seem to fall away from him as soon as he passes the door. They become irrelevant. The only thing that counts is what he is as a man; and even that doesn’t count for everything.”