‘But you don’t mean to say there’s any fun in a week’s drink at a wretched pot-house, even if the first hour is as good as you say. Then the waking up!’
‘But there is fun in it,’ persisted the poor relation, ‘else why do hundreds and thousands do it? All these chaps are not fools, much less lazy; it’s the hardest workers and best hands among us working chaps that’s the worst drinkers, by odds. As to the waking up, as you say, it’s bad enough, but a strong man gets over it in a day or two, and tackles his bread and meat, and his work, pretty much as usual till the time of the next spree comes round.’
‘But what a fool a man must think himself,’ said Ernest, ‘at the end of a week, when he finds that he has spent all the fruit of a year’s labour, and is obliged to begin another solitary weary year.’
‘It is bad, as you say, sir. You’re quite right; but right’s one thing and human nature’s another, in the bush, anyhow. I remember coming to myself in the dead-house of a bush inn once, and I felt like a dead man too; the parson had been preaching at our woolshed the week before, and that text came into my head, and kept ringing through it like a hundred bullock bells.’
‘And what was it, Jack?’
‘“In hell he lifted up his eyes.” I ain’t very likely to forget. He gave us a great dressin’ down for drink and swearing, and bad ways, and so on. We deserved it right enough, and his words struck.’
‘What did you do then?’
‘I just crawled into the bar, sir, and when the landlord gave me a nip I put it on the counter and bent down to it; blessed if my hand wasn’t too shaky to hold it.’
‘“How much is left of my cheque?” says I. “Forty-three twelve six, it was.”
‘“Not a blessed shilling,” says he; “you’ve been treating all round, and having champagne like water; it ain’t likely a small cheque like that would last long.”