On the third floor were the dormitories for club members—men who had kept
sober for three months and more, and who wore a star of a color denoting
the variety of their achievements. On this floor, too, was a billiard,
card, and smoking room, accessible to any one, even to outsiders, who had
kept sober for three weeks. On the top floor of all were a few bedrooms,
formerly those of Miss Smedley’s servants, reserved for the occasional
occupancy of such grandees as had preserved their integrity for three
years and more; and here, too, was the sacred place known as “the
lounge,” to which none were admitted who didn’t wear the gold or silver
star representing sobriety for at least a year.
The whole was, therefore, a carefully arranged hierarchy in which one
mounted according to one’s merit. Little Spender wore the gold star,
indicating a five years’ fight with the devil; and Mouse, the cook, a
blue one, which meant that he had been victorious for three months.
All others in the club when Lovey and I arrived were outsiders like
ourselves. Outsiders gave their word to stay a week, generally for the
purpose of sobering up, but beyond that nothing was asked of them. At the
beginning of the second week they could either continue their novitiate
or go.
This information was given me by Spender as we stood on the threshold of
the bath-room before I passed in. When the tale was ended, however, the
Scotchman, who had taken little or no part in our reception, pushed by me
and entered.
“You’ll be wanting a shave,” he said, in explanation of his rudeness.
“There are my things”—he got down on all-fours to show me a safety razor
and a broken cup containing a brush and shaving-soap, hidden behind
one of the legs of the bath-tub—“and you’ll oblige me by putting them
back. Daisy, the wee bye you saw at the table, is doing the same by
your chum. I make no doubt your own things have been held in your last
rooming-house.”
When I had admitted that this was exactly the case and had thanked my
friends for their courtesies, they withdrew, leaving me to my toilet.
After the good meal the bath was a genuine luxury. It was a decent
bath-room, kept by the men, as all the house was kept, in a kind of dingy
cleanliness. Cleanliness, I found, was not only a principle of the club;
it was one of the first indications that those who came in for shelter
gave of a survival of self-respect. Some of their efforts in that way
were amusing or pathetic, as the case might be, but they were always
human and touching.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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