At Wideview Chalet

THE ALARM clock beside Bisker’s bed called him to his daily life at half-past five. The clock appeared to be armour-clad and completely shock-resisting, for every time the alarm began it was cut short by a callused hand which crashed down upon it with such force that a lesser mechanism would have been smashed flat.

At five-thirty on this first morning in September it was quite dark. Inside Bisker’s room it was coal-black, and, until Bisker began the recitation of the first complaint of the day, utterly silent. Bisker’s voice was loud with emphasis.

“A manoughter be sunk a million miles below the bottom of the deepest well on earth,” he said, in his heart duty wrestling with the desire to strike. “Oh, what a limbless fool I am. Curse the drink! You dirty swine… it’s you that stops me saving enough money to get me outer this frost-bitten, rain-drowned, lousy hole of a joint, get me back to where there’s a thousand tons of good, dry wood to the acre, and where a man can lie abed all day if he wants to. Oh, blast! If that old cowsezs two words to me this morning, I’ll up and slap ’erdown.”

Striking a match, he lit the hurricane lamp standing on the wooden kerosene case beside the bed. Then he took up one of two pipes, in the bowl of which had been compressed the dried “dottles” taken during the previous day from the other pipe. Bisker was a connoisseur in the art of nicotine poisoning and he favoured an extra-strong dose before rising in the mornings, to be followed with mere ordinary doses during the day. To avoid wasting time, the special dose was loaded into the pipe overnight. For five minutes he smoked with only his face outside the blankets, even his face being partially protected from the air by a bristling, stained grey moustache.

“Fancy a man coming down to this!” he exclaimed loudly. “An’ me an up-an’-at-’emcattle drover most of me life. Just tells you what the booze will do to a bloke. Ah, well!”