“For good and all, Slim?”
“Yes; for good and all.”
“It’ll be awful ’ard.”
“Yes, it will be; but the worst of that is over.”
He seized one of my hands in both of his.
“Slim, if it’s got to be a ch’ice between you and liquor—well, I’m danged if—if I won’t”—he made a great resolution—“give up the liquor—and so ’elp me!”
So when I moved Lovey moved with me. Washing windows having become a lucrative profession, he insisted on taking no wages from me and on paying for his own food. In the matter of names we agreed on a compromise. “Before company,” as he expressed it, I was Mr. Melbury and sir; when we were alone together we reverted to the habits of Greeley’s Slip and the Down and Out, and I became Slim and sonny.
I was truly sorry to leave the club, for its simple, brotherly ways, wholesome and masculine, if never the most refined, had become curiously a part of me. I had liked the fellowship with rough men who were perhaps all the more human for being rough. For the first time in my life I had known something of genuine fraternity. I do not affirm that we lived together without disagreements or misunderstandings or that there were no minutes electric with the tension that makes for an all-round fight. But there was always some “wise guy,” as we called him, to make peace among us; and on the whole we lived together with a mutual courtesy that proved to me once for all that it is nothing external which makes a gentleman. Finer gentlemen in the essentials of the word I never met than some of those who were just struggling up from the seemingly bottomless pit.
Thus the summer of 1913 became for me a very happy one. There were reserves to that happiness, and there were fears; but the optimism most of us bring to the day’s work enabled me to face them. Of Regina Barry I heard much from my friend Cantyre, and I made what I heard suffice me. He was always willing to talk of this girl, whom he never named; and little by little I formed an image in my heart, which would never be anywhere but in my heart as long as I could help it. As long as I could help it I should not see her, nor should she see me. As to that I was now quite positive. Nothing could be gained by my seeing her, while by her seeing me everything might be lost.