Chapter Eighteen.
Two Heads Better Than One.
“Fordham, old man, I’m in a devil of a mess,” announced Philip, dolefully, bursting into his friend’s room the following morning while the latter was shaving.
“I tell you what it is, Sir Philip Orlebar as is to be,” returned Fordham, who was in an abominably bad humour, pausing with his razor arrested. “You’ll be the death of me long before you arrive at that dignity unless you get out of a certain vile habit of crashing in upon a man during such critical moments as this. Do you think I’ve no nerves?”
“Well, I certainly did think so.”
“So it seems. But I have. So would you have if you had been expected to sleep beneath two parsons pounding about overhead in nailed boots half the night, and starting again at four o’clock this morning. The noisiest people in their rooms in these ramshackle hotels are invariably parsons and women; I imagine because the first are supposed to be professionally unselfish and the second traditionally so.”
“How do you know they were parsons?” said Philip. “Sent up the femme de chambre to ask them politely to take their boots off. She came back grinning, ‘Ce sont deux pasteurs anglais, M’sieu, qui viennent de passer le Trift-joch.’ Well, the avalanche that failed to engulph them was an avalanche in the wrong place, decidedly. I might just as well not have sent up; for though I’m not a sufficiently impartial witness to assert that they made more row thereafter, I’m fully prepared to swear that they didn’t make any less.”
“H’m! But I say, Fordham. I was saying, I’m in the very devil’s own mess.”
“That is not infrequently the case, the extent of my acquaintance with you warrants me in asserting. May I ask the nature of it this time?”
“I’ve had a devil of a row with old Glover.”