“Oh, I don’t?”
“Rather not. Look at this,” with a comprehensive sweep of the hand. “Think what a splendid climb we had to get up here. Think what a splendid one we are going to have to get down, better, in fact, because less of sheer fag, and then think how many poor devils there are who would give their heads to be here to-day, instead of slaving their hearts out all their lives to support some snarling, ungrateful female, and a mob of more or less dirty and wholly detestable brats.”
“Candidly, my dear chap,” returned Philip, “you are becoming somewhat of the nature of a bore. I seem to have heard something very like that before—not once, nor yet twice. The salutary instructions of the immortal Mr Barlow, of ‘Sandford and Merton’ fame, shine forth as very masterpieces of sparkling pungency when contrasted with your latter-day harangues. I want to know what the devil all this has to do with me.”
“You shall! The gist of the parable is this. You are thinking all this time that Paradise lies at present in the Zinal valley in general, and very particularly in the Hôtel Durand; whereas in actual fact, so far as any semblance of that institution may be said to exist, it lies around and before you. For you are free at present, Phil, free as the air up here which is making us shiver, your freedom is as boundless as this rolling view of half a continent upon which we look down. You have the world at your feet as literally as we have it before us now.”
“Go on, Mr Barlow. Pray proceed.”
“I will. At present you are thinking what a Paradise every moment of life would be if coupled with the charmer down yonder. You are drawing all manner of glowing mental pictures of the bliss of a home illumined by her divine presence. All fustian, my dear fellow, all fustian! These superstitions are encouraged by the women from obvious motives. But they have no foundation in actual fact. Now what I am thinking of is this. I am thinking of you in two or three years’ time, caged up with your charmer in some shabby-genteel suburban semi-detached—for she hasn’t a shilling of her own, I believe—I am thinking of you, I say, the proud possessor of two or three unruly brats—who may or may not be kept clean—thus caged up, with a domineering, bad-tempered woman, who has parted with her illusions, in proportion as she has contributed towards populating this interesting orb. I am thinking of you toiling the day through, week in week out, at some sordid and uncongenial drudgery for a mere pittance. You can never be well off, my dear Phil, for to do you justice, you lack the essential qualities of rascality and sycophancy which are requisite to the manufacture of the ‘successful man.’ And while your scanty leisure is taken up policing a series of ever-changing and refractory domestics, or carrying on epistolary war with your landlord, in re his inevitable refusal to observe the most obvious provisions of his agreement, your much-needed slumbers will be invaded by the piercing and colicky yells of the last overfed cherub, and your night devoted to hospital duties in regard to that same. And then when you look back to—this day, for instance—I am not far out in asserting that you will catch yourself wondering whether such an unparalleled ass is even worth the sixpenny-worth of laudanum which should send him in search of the decisive change which may possibly be for the better, but can hardly be for the worse. There—that’s the other side of the orange, and now you can’t say it hasn’t been shown you.”
“That all, Fordham?”
“Nearly. But think it over, think it over, my dear chap. The gift of freedom is a grand and a glorious one. Don’t throw it away for the traditional mess of pottage—a comestible which may or may not be an excellent thing, but cannot in my humble judgment maintain its savour if subsisted on for the term of one’s natural life to the exclusion of all other articles of diet.”
“I appreciate the point of that highly finished hyperbole—at its true valuation,” returned Philip, ironically. “And, look here, Fordham, I feel it necessary to amend my former comment. A man who will undertake to deliver such an unconscionably prosy preachment, on the very apex of a high Alp, is no longer merely becoming a bore, but has become one—in fact is a bore, and that of the first magnitude.”