“In dead earnest.”
“I am going in the very cheapest possible manner.”
“So am I.”
“I am going, with a few pounds I have scraped together, to try my luck.”
“The same with me. It can’t be worse than England; starvation is certain here. Come, say, honour bright—will you be glad of me as a companion—as a friend if you like? I am a lonely bit of driftwood like yourself.”
Then Noakes rose to his feet and this time squeezed Joyce’s hand and his pale eyes glistened.
“I ’ll swear to be your friend in peace and in danger,” he said, in his quaint phraseology. “And I thank the God of all mercies for sending you to me in my hour of need.”
“All right,” said Joyce. “And now let us have some whisky, and talk over details.”
And so, in that dingy billiard-room, unknown to the moulting Bohemians huddled up in somnolent attitudes close by on the divan and unheeded by the shirt-sleeved men passing around the table intent on their game, was struck the strangest bargain of a friendship ever made between two outcast men; a friendship that was to last through want and sickness and despair and hope, and to leave behind it the ineffaceable stamp of nobler feeling.
But at first there was much admixture of cynicism on Joyce’s side. He laughed aloud, in the bitterness of his heart, at the object he had taken for his bosom friend. It was only later, when he learned the patient, dog-like devotion of the man, that he felt humbled and ashamed at these beginnings.