CHAPTER V
My acquaintance with Ralph Coningsby was the hinge on which my destiny turned. A hinge is a small thing as compared with a door, and so was my friendship with Coningsby in proportion to the rest of my life; but it became its cardinal point.
I met him first at the meeting of the club at which the Scotchman and the piano-mover presented themselves for membership. As to the five outsiders whom Lovey and I had found on arriving, Christian’s prediction was verified. Three went out when their week was over and they had got sobered up. Two stayed behind to go on with the work of reform. At the end of another week each stood up with his next friend, as a bridegroom with his best man, and asked to be taken into fellowship.
That was at the great weekly gathering, which took place every Saturday night. Among the hundred and fifty-odd men who had assembled in the two down-stairs sitting-rooms it was not difficult to single out Coningsby, since he was the only man I could see in whom there was nothing blasted or scorched or tragic. There was another there of whom this was true, but I didn’t meet him till toward the end of the evening.
I had now been some ten days within the four walls of the club, not sobering up, as you know, but trying to find myself. The figure of speech is a good one, for the real Frank Melbury seemed to have been lost. This otherself, this self I was anxious to get rid of, had left him in some bright and relatively innocent world, while it went roaming through a land of sand and thorns. I had distinctly the feeling of being in search of my genuine identity.
For this I sat through long hours of every day doing absolutely nothing—that is, it was absolutely nothing so far as the eye could see; but inwardly the spirit was busy. I came, too, to understand that that was the secret of the long, stupefied forenoons and afternoons on the part of my companions. They were stupefied only because sight couldn’t follow the activity of their occupation. Beyond the senses so easily staggered by strong drink there was a man endeavoring to come forth and claim his own. In far, subliminal, unexplored regions of the personality that man was forever at work. I could see him at work. He was at work when the flesh had reached the end of its short tether, and reeled back from its brief and helpless efforts to enjoy. He was at work when the sore and sodden body could do nothing but sit in lumbering idleness. He was at work when the glazed eye could hardly lift its stare from a spot on the floor.
That was why tobacco no longer afforded solace, nor reading distraction, nor an exchange of anecdotes mental relaxation. I don’t mean to say that we indulged in none of these pastimes, but we indulged in them slightly. On the one hand, they were pale in comparison with the raw excitement our appetites craved; and on the other, they offered nothing to the spirit which was, so to speak, aching and clamorous. Apart from the satisfaction we got from sure and regular food and sleep, our nearest approach to comfort was in a kind of silent, tactual clinging together. None of us wanted to be really alone. Wecould sit for hours without exchanging more than a casual word or two, when it frightened us to have no one else in the room. The sheer promiscuity of bed against bed enabled us to sleep without nightmares.
The task of chumming up had, therefore, been an easy one. So little was demanded. When a new-comer had been shown the ropes of the house there was not much more to do for him. One could only silently help him to find his lost identity as one was finding one’s own.
“That’s about all there is to it,” Andrew Christian observed when I had said something of the sort to him. “You can’t push a man into the kingdom of heaven; he’s got to climb up to it of his own accord. There’s no salvation except what one works out through one’s own sweat and blood.” He gave me one of his quick, semi-humorous glances. “I suppose you know what salvation is?”
I replied that I had heard a great deal about it all my life, but I was far from sure of what it entailed in either effort or accomplishment.
“Salvation is being normal. The intuitive old guys who coined language saw that plainly enough when they connected the idea with health. Fundamentally health is salvation and salvation is health—only perfect health, health not only of the body, but of the mind. Did it ever strike you that health and holiness and wholeness are all one word?”
I said it never had.
“Well, it’s worth thinking about. There’s a lot in it. You’ll get a lot out of it. The holy man is not the hermit on his knees in the desert, or the saint in colored glass, or anything that we make to correspond to them. He’s the fellow who’s whole—who’s sound in wind and limb and intelligence and sympathy and everything that makespower. When we say, ‘O worship the Lord in the beauty of holiness,’ we mean, O worship the Lord in the beauty of the all-round man, who’s developed in every direction, and whose degree of holiness is just in proportion to that development.”
“That’s a big thought, sir,” I said. “I don’t believe many people who speak the English language ever get hold of it. But how does it happen that one of the two words is spelt with a ‘w,’ while the other—”
He laughed, showing two rows of small, regular white teeth, as pretty as a girl’s.
“That was another lot of intuitive guys; and a very neat trick they played on us. They saw that once the Anglo-Saxon, with his fine, big sporting instinct, got hold of the idea that holiness meant spreading out and living out in all manly directions—and by that I don’t mean giving free rein to one’s appetites, of course—but they saw that once the idea became plain to us the triumph of lust would be lost. So they inserted that little bluffing, blinding ‘w,’ which doesn’t belong there at all, to put us off the scent; and off the scent we went. Church and state and human society have all combined to make holiness one of the most anemic, flat-chested words in the language, when it’s really a synonym of normality.”
We exchanged these thoughts in the narrow hall of the club, as he happened to be passing, and stopped for a few words. It was always his way. He never treated us to long and formal interviews. From a handclasp and a few chance sentences we got the secret of a personality which gave out its light and heat like radium, without effort and without exhaustion.
“What do yer think ’e says to me?” Lovey demanded of me one day. “‘Lovey,’ says ’e, ‘yer’ve got a terr’bleresponsibility on ye with that young fella, Slim. If you go under ’e goes under, and if you keep straight ’e keeps straight.’ What do yer think of that?”
“I think you’re doing an awful lot for me, Lovey.”
He slapped his leg.
“Ye got that number right, old son. There’s nobody else in the world I’d ’a’ done it for. If you ’adn’t taken a fancy to me, like, that night, and arsked me to go ’ome with you—But, say, Slim,” he went on, confidentially, “wouldn’t you like to ’ave a drink?”
Wouldn’t I like to have a drink? There was thirst in the very rustle of Lovey’s throat. There was the same thirst in my own. It was more than a thirst of the appetite—it was a thirst of the being, of whatever had become myself. It was one of the moments at which the lost identity seemed farther away than ever, and the Frank Melbury of the last three years the man in possession.
I couldn’t, however, let Lovey see that.
“Oh, one gets used to going without drinks.”
“Do ye? I don’t. I’d take a drink of ’air-oil if anybody’d give me one. I’d take a drink of ink. Anything that comes out of a bottle’d be better’n nothink, after all this water from a jug.”
During the first few days at the club this was my usual state, not of mind, but of sensation. During the next few days I passed into a condition that I can best express as one of physical resignation. The craving for drink was not less insistent, but it was more easily denied. Since I couldn’t get it I could do without it, and not want to dash my head against a stone. But after the words with Andrew Christian I have just recorded I began to feel—oh, ever so slightly!—that Nature had a realm of freedomand vigor in which there was no need of extraordinary stimulants, and of which sunshine, air, and water might be taken as the symbols. With the resting of my overexcited nerves and the response of a body radically healthy to regular sleep and simple food, I began to feel, at least at intervals, that water, air, and sunshine were the natural elements to thrive on.
My first glance at Ralph Coningsby showed me a man who had thriven on them. He was the type to whom most of us take at sight—the clean, fresh, Anglo-Saxon type, blue-eyed and fair, whom you couldn’t do anything but trust.
“God! how I should like to look like that!” I said to myself the minute I saw him come in.
I knew by this time that at the big weekly meetings there were sometimes friendly visitors whose touch with the club was more or less accidental. I had no difficulty in putting this man down as one. He entered as if he were at any ordinary gathering of friends, with a nod here, a handshake there, and a few words with some one else. Then for a minute he stood, letting his eyes search the room till they rested on me, where I stood in a corner of the front sitting-room.
There was at once that livening of the glance that showed he had found what he was looking for. Making his way through the groups that were standing about, he came up and offered his hand.
“Your name’s Melbury, isn’t it? Mine’s Coningsby. I think you must be the same Melbury who went to the Beaux Arts in the fall of the year in which I left in the spring.”
“Oh, you’re that Coningsby? You used to know Bully Harris?”
“Rather! He and I lived together for a year in the Rue de Seine.”
“And he and I spent a year in the same house in the Rue Bonaparte.”
“And now he’s out in Red Wing, Minnesota, doing very well, I hear.”
“The last time I saw him was in London. We dined together at the Piccadilly and did a theater.”
“And Tommy Runt? Do you ever hear of him?”
“Not since he went back to Melbourne; but that chap he was always about with—Saunderson, wasn’t it?—he was killed in a motor accident near Glasgow.”
“So I heard. Some one told me—Pickman, I think it was—an Englishman—but you didn’t know Pickman, did you? He left the year I came, which must have been three or four years before your time. By the way, why don’t we sit down?”
In the process of sitting down I remembered my manners.
“Mr. Coningsby, won’t you let me introduce you to my friend, Mr. Lovey?”
Lovey was seated, nursing a knee and looking as wretched as a dog to whom no one is paying the customary attention. He resented Coningsby’s appearance; he resented a kind of talk which put me beyond his reach.
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 whichwe 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.”
“What does count for everything?” I asked, in some curiosity.
“That he’s a man at all.”
“That’s it exactly,” I agreed, heartily. “I hadn’t put it to myself in that way; but I see that it’s what I’ve been conscious of.”
“As an instance of that you can take the friendship between Straight and Christian. From the point of view of the outside world they’re of types so diverse that you’d say that the difference precluded friendship of any kind. You know what Christian is; but the colonel is hardly what you’d call a man of education. Without being illiterate, he makes elementary grammatical mistakes, and unusual ideas floor him. But to say that he and Christian are like brothers hardly expresses it.”
I pondered on this as the meeting, with Christian in the chair, came to order and the routine of business began.
When it grew uninteresting to people with no share in the management of the club I got an opportunity to whisper, “You settled in New York?”
“I’m with Sterling Barry; the junior of the four partners.”
The reply seemed to strip from me the few rags of respectability with which I had been trying to cover myself up. Had he gone on to say, “And I saw you break into his house and steal his daughter’s trinkets,” I should scarcely have felt myself more pitilessly exposed.
It was perhaps a proof of what the club had done for me that I no longer regarded this crime with the same sang-froid as when I entered. Even on the morning of my first talk with Andrew Christian I could have confessed it more or less as I should have owned to a solecism in etiquette. During the intervening ten days, however, I had so far reverted to my former better self that the knowledge that I was the man who had crept into a house and begun to rob it filled me with dismay.
I had to pretend that I didn’t want to interrupt the conducting of business to conceal the fact that I was unable to reply.
“You’ve worked in New York, too?” he began again, when there was a chance of speaking.
I had by this time so far recovered myself as to be able to tell him the names of my various employers. I didn’t add that they had fired me one after another because of my drinking-spells, since I supposed he would take that for granted.
“Ever thought of Barry’s?”
“I brought a letter of introduction to him from McArdle, of Montreal; but I never presented it.”
“Pity.”
“Yes, perhaps it was. But you see I didn’t like McArdle’s work, though I studied under him. As I was afraid of getting into the same old rut, I went to Pritchard.”
“What do you think of Barry’s things now?”
“Oh, I like them—though they’re not so severe as I should go in for myself. The modern French is a little too florid, and he goes them one better.”
“Just my feeling. I should like you to see a bit of work I’ve been doing on my own; rather a big order—forme, that is—in which I’ve had to be as American as the deuce, and yet keep to the best lines.”
“Like to,” I managed to whisper back as we heard Christian announce that two new men were now to be admitted to the club.
I was interested in the ceremony, having by this time got on friendly terms with both the piano-mover and the Scotchman, and learned something of their history. With necessary divergences the general trend of these tales was the same. Both were married men, both had children, in both cases “the home was broken up”—the phrase had become classic in the club; though in the one instance the wife had taken the children to her own people, and in the other she was doing her best to support them herself.
Their names being called, there was a scraping of chairs, after which the two men lumbered forward, each accompanied by his next friend. The office of next friend, as I came to learn, was one of such responsibility as to put a strain on anything like next friendship. The Scotchman’s next friend was a barber, who, as part of his return for the club’s benefits to himself, had that afternoon cut the hair of all of us inmates—nineteen in number; while the piano-mover had as his sponsor the famous Beady Lamont. The latter pair moved forward like two elephants, their tread shaking the floor.
I shall not describe this initiation further than to say that everything about it was simple, direct, and impressive. The four men being lined in front of Mr. Christian’s desk, the spokesman for the authorities was old Colonel Straight.
“The difference between this club and every other club,” he said, in substance, “is that men goes to otherclubs to amuse theirselves, and here they come to fight. This club is an army. Any one who joins it joins a corps. You two men who wants to come in with us ’ave got to remember that up to now you’ve been on your own and independent; and now you’ll be entering a company. Up to now, if you worked you worked for yourself; if you loafed you loafed for yourself; if you was lounge lizards you was lounge lizards on your own account and no one else’s; and if you got drunk no one but you—leaving out your wife and children; though why I leave them out God alone knows!—but if you got drunk no one but you had to suffer. Now it’s going to be all different. You can’t get drunk without hurting us, and we can’t get drunk without hurting you. T’other way round—every bit of fight we put up helps you, and every bit of fight you put up helps us.
“Now there’s lots of things I could say to you this evening; but the only one I want to jam right home is this: You and us look at this thing from different points of view. You come here hoping that we’re going to help you to keep straight. That’s all right. So we are; and we’ll all be on the job from this night forward. You won’t find us taking no vacation, and your next friends here’ll worry you like your own consciences. They’ll never leave you alone the minute you ain’t safe. You’ll hear ’em promise to hunt for you if you go astray, and go down into the ditch with you and pull you out. There’ll be no dive so deep that they won’t go after you, and no kicks and curses that you can give ’em that they won’t stand in order to haul you back. That’s all gospel true, as you’re going to find out if you go back on your promises. But that ain’t the way the rest of us—the hundred and fifty of us that you see here to-night—looks at it at all.What we see ain’t two men we’re tumbling over each other to help; we see two men that’s coming to help us. And, oh, men, you’d better believe that we need your help! You look round and you see this elegant house—and the beds—and the grub—and everything decent and reg’lar—and you think how swell we’ve got ourselves fixed. But I tell you, men, we’re fighting for our life—the whole hundred and fifty of us! And another hundred and fifty that ain’t here! And another hundred and fifty that’s scattered to the four winds of the earth; we’re fighting for our life; we’re fighting with our back against the wall. We ain’t out of danger because we’ve been a year or two years or five years in the club. We’re never out of danger. We need every ounce of support that any one can bring to us; and here you fellows come bringing it! You’re bringing it, Colin MacPherson, and you’re bringing it, Tapley Toms; and there ain’t a guy among us that isn’t glad and grateful. If you go back on your own better selves you go back on us first of all; and if either of you falls, you leave each one of us so much the weaker.”
That, with a funny story or two, was the gist of it; but delivered in a low, richly vibrating voice, audible in every corner of the room and addressed directly and earnestly to the two candidates, its effect was not unlike that of Whitfield’s dying man preaching to dying men. All the scarred, haunted faces, behind each of which there lurked memories blacker than those of the madhouse, were turned toward the speaker raptly. Knowledge of their own hearts and knowledge of his gave the words a power and a value beyond anything they carried on the surface. The red-hot experience of a hundred and fifty men was poured molten into the minute, to give to the promisesthe two postulants were presently called on to make a kind of iron vigor.
Those promises were simple. Colin MacPherson and Tapley Toms took the total-abstinence pledge for a week, after which they would be asked to renew it for similar periods till they felt strong enough to take it for a month. They would remain as residents of the club till morally re-established, but they would look for work, in which the club would assist them, and send at least three-quarters of their earnings to their wives. As soon as they were strong enough they would set up homes for their families again, and try to atone for their failure in the mean time. They would do their best to strengthen other members of the club, and to live in peace with them. The religious question was shelved by asking each man to give his word to reconnect himself with the church in which he had been brought up.
The promises exacted of the next friends were, as became veterans, more severe. They were to be guardians of the most zealous activity, and shrink from no insult or injury in the exercise of their functions. If their charges fell irretrievably away, their brothers in the club would be sorry for them, even though the guilt would not be laid at their door.
When some twenty or thirty members had renewed their vows for a third or fourth or fifth week, as the case happened to be, the meeting broke up for refreshments.
It was during this finale to the evening that Coningsby brought up a man somewhat of his own type, and yet different. He was different in that, though of the same rank and age, he was tall and dark, and carried himself with a slight stoop of the shoulders. An olive complexion touched off with well-rounded black eyebrows and a neatblack mustache made one take him at first for a foreigner, while the dreaminess of the dark eyes was melancholy and introspective, if not quite despondent.
“Melbury, I want you to know Doctor Cantyre, who holds the honorable office of physician in ordinary to the club.”
Once more I was in conversation with a man of antecedents similar to my own, and once more the breaking of the ice was that between men accustomed to the same order of associations. In this case we found them in Cantyre’s tourist recollections of Montreal and Quebec, and his enjoyment of winter sports.