The words were accompanied by such a smile that I, who am not emotional, felt my eyes smart.
The summer passed with no more than two or three other incidents worth the jotting down.
In the first place, the day arrived when I had to make up my mind either to leave the club or to join it. Expecting some opposition from Lovey as to joining it, I was surprised to find him take the suggestion complacently.
“I’ve found out,” he whispered to me, “that yer can jine this club—and fall. Yer can fall three times before they’ll turn ye out.”
“Oh, but you wouldn’t want to fall in cold blood.”
“Well,” he muttered, doubtfully, “I ain’t partic’lar about the blood. Now my hadvice’d be this: ’Ere we are in July. That’s all right; we can jine. Then in Haugust we can ’ave a wee little bit of a fall—just two or three days like. We can do the same in September; and the same in Hoctober. That’ll use up our three times, and we can come back under cover for the worst months of the winter. We can’t fall no more after that; but in the spring we can try somethink else. There’s always things.”
“Oh, if you can keep straight without me—”
“But if I can’t, Lovey? If I must keep straight and need you to help me?”
He clasped his hands against his stomach and drew a dismal face.
“And isn’t there,” I continued, “another point of view? Suppose we did what you suggest, do you think it would be treating all these nice fellows decently?”
“Oh, if you’re going to start out treatin’ people decent—”
“Well, why shouldn’t we? We can do it—you and I together.”
“I must say, Slim, yer do beat everythink for puttin’ things on me.”
But in the end we were both admitted at one of the Saturday-evening meetings with, as usual, a large gathering of friends, and some bracing words from Straight. Pyn stood up with me as next friend, and little Spender did the same by Lovey. I have not said that during the ten days before I went to work Pyn blew in at the club during some minutes of every lunch hour to watch my progress. It was he, too, who found Lovey the job of washing windows, by which that worthy also had a chance of returning to honest ways. Indeed, though I cannot repeat it frequently enough, of the many hands stretched out to help me upward none was stronger in its grasp than that of the kindly keeper of the soda-water fountain to whom the club had given a veritable new birth.