Breakfast was very nearly over, and it was of such exceptionally good
quality that very few remarks had been made. Finally the ball was set
rolling by the Lawyer.
"How many packs of cigarettes do you smoke a day?" he asked, as the Idiot
took one from his pocket and placed it at the side of his coffee-cup.
"Never more than forty-six," said the Idiot. "Why? Do you think of
starting a cigarette stand?"
"Not at all," said Mr. Brief. "I was only wondering what chance you had
to live to maturity, that's all. Your maturity period will be in about
eight hundred and sixty years from now, the way I calculate, and it
seemed to me that, judging from the number of cigarettes you smoke, you
were not likely to last through more than two or three of those years."
"Oh, I expect to live longer than that," said the Idiot. "I think I'm
good for at least four years. Don't you, Doctor?"
"I decline to have anything to say about your case," retorted the Doctor,
whose feeling towards the Idiot was not surpassingly affectionate.
"In that event I shall probably live five years more," said the Idiot.
The Doctor's lip curled, but he remained silent.
"You'll live," put in Mr. Pedagog, with a chuckle. "The good die young."
"How did you happen to keep alive all this time then, Mr. Pedagog?" asked
the Idiot.
"I have always eschewed tobacco in every form, for one thing," said Mr.
Pedagog.
"I am surprised," put in the Idiot. "That's really a bad habit, and I
marvel greatly that you should have done it."
The School-Master frowned, and looked at the Idiot over the rims of his
glasses, as was his wont when he was intent upon getting explanations.
"Done what?" he asked, severely.
"Chewed tobacco," replied the Idiot. "You just said that one of the
things that has kept you lingering in this vale of tears was that you
have always chewed tobacco. I never did that, and I never shall do it,
because I deem it a detestable diversion."
"I didn't say anything of the sort," retorted Mr. Pedagog, getting red in
the face. "I never said that I chewed tobacco in any form."
"Oh, come!" said the Idiot, with well-feigned impatience, "what's the use
of talking that way? We all heard what you said, and I have no doubt that
it came as a shock to every member of this assemblage. It certainly was a
shock to me, because, with all my weaknesses and bad habits, I think
tobacco-chewing unutterably bad. The worst part of it is that you chew it
in every form. A man who chews chewing-tobacco only may some time throw
off the habit, but when one gets to be such a victim to it that he chews
up cigars and cigarettes and plugs of pipe tobacco, it seems to me he is
incurable. It is not only a bad habit then; it amounts to a vice."
Mr. Pedagog was getting apoplectic. "You know well enough that I never
said the words you attribute to me," he said, sternly.
"Really, Mr. Pedagog," returned the Idiot, with an irritating shake of
his head, as if he were confidentially hinting to the School-Master to
keep quiet--"really you pain me by these futile denials. Nobody forced
you into the confession. You made it entirely of your own volition. Now
I ask you, as a man and brother, what's the use of saying anything more
about it? We believe you to be a person of the strictest veracity, but
when you say a thing before a tableful of listeners one minute, and deny
it the next, we are forced to one of two conclusions, neither of which is
pleasing. We must conclude that either, repenting your confession, you
sacrifice the truth, or that the habit to which you have confessed has
entirely destroyed your perception of the moral question involved. Undue
use of tobacco has, I believe, driven men crazy. Opium-eating has
destroyed all regard for truth in one whose word had always been regarded
as good as a government bond. I presume the undue use of tobacco can
accomplish the same sad result. By-the-way, did you ever try opium?"
"Opium is ruin," said the Doctor, Mr. Pedagog's indignation being so
great that he seemed to be unable to find the words he was evidently
desirous of hurling at the Idiot.
"It is, indeed," said the Idiot. "I knew a man once who smoked one little
pipeful of it, and, while under its influence, sat down at his table and
wrote a story of the supernatural order that was so good that everybody
said he must have stolen it from Poe or some other master of the weird,
and now nobody will have anything to do with him. Tobacco, however, in
the sane use of it, is a good thing. I don't know of anything that is
more satisfying to the tired man than to lie back on a sofa, of an
evening, and puff clouds of smoke and rings into the air. One of the
finest dreams I ever had came from smoking. I had blown a great mountain
of smoke out into the room, and it seemed to become real, and I climbed
to its summit and saw the most beautiful country at my feet--a country in
which all men were happy, where there were no troubles of any kind, where
no whim was left ungratified, where jealousies were not, and where every
man who made more than enough to live on paid the surplus into the common
treasury for the use of those who hadn't made quite enough. It was a
national realization of the golden rule, and I maintain that if smoking
were bad nothing so good, even in the abstract form of an idea, could
come out of it."
"That's a very nice thought," said the Poet. "I'd like to put that into
verse. The idea of a people dividing up their surplus of wealth among the
less successful strugglers is beautiful."
"You can have it," said the Idiot, with a pleased smile. "I don't write
poetry of that kind myself unless I work hard, and I've found that when
the poet works hard he produces poems that read hard. You are welcome to
it. Another time I was dreaming over my cigar, after a day of the hardest
kind of trouble at the office. Everything had gone wrong with me, and I
was blue as indigo. I came home here, lit a cigar, and threw myself down
upon my bed and began to puff. I felt like a man in a deep pit, out of
which there was no way of getting. I closed my eyes for a second, and to
all intents and purposes I lay in that pit. And then what did tobacco do
for me? Why, it lifted me right out of my prison. I thought I was sitting
on a rock down in the depths. The stars twinkled tantalizingly above me.
They invited me to freedom, knowing that freedom was not attainable. Then
I blew a ring of smoke from my mouth, and it began to rise slowly at
first, and then, catching in a current of air, it flew upward more
rapidly, widening constantly, until it disappeared in the darkness above.
Then I had a thought. I filled my mouth as full of smoke as possible, and
blew forth the greatest ring you ever saw, and as it started to rise I
grasped it in my two hands. It struggled beneath my weight, lengthened
out into an elliptical link, and broke, and let me down with a dull thud.
Then I made two rings, grasping one with my left hand and the other with
my right--"
[Illustration: "I GRASPED IT IN MY TWO HANDS"]
"And they lifted you out of the pit, I suppose?" sneered the
Bibliomaniac.
"I do not say that they did," said the Idiot, calmly. "But I do know that
when I opened my eyes I wasn't in the pit any longer, but up-stairs in my
hall-bedroom."
"How awfully mysterious!" said the Doctor, satirically.
"Well, I don't approve of smoking," said Mr. Whitechoker. "I agree with
the London divine who says it is the pastime of perdition. It is not
prompted by natural instincts. It is only the habit of artificial
civilization. Dogs and horses and birds get along without it. Why
shouldn't man?"
"Hear! hear!" cried Mr. Pedagog, clapping his hands approvingly.
"Where? where?" put in the Idiot. "That's a great argument. Dog's don't
put up in boarding-houses. Is the boarding-house, therefore, the result
of a degraded, artificial civilization? I have seen educated horses that
didn't smoke, but I have never seen an educated horse, or an uneducated
one, for that matter, that had even had the chance to smoke, or the kind
of mouth that would enable him to do it in case he had the chance. I
have also observed that horses don't read books, that birds don't eat
mutton-chops, that dogs don't go to the opera, that donkeys don't play
the piano--at least, four-legged donkeys don't--so you might as well
argue that since horses, dogs, birds, and donkeys get along without
literature, music, mutton-chops, and piano-playing--"
"You've covered music," put in the Lawyer, who liked to be precise.
"True; but piano-playing isn't always music," returned the Idiot.
"You might as well argue because the beasts and the birds do without
these things man ought to. Fish don't smoke, neither do they join the
police-force, therefore man should neither smoke nor become a guardian
of the peace."
[Illustration: "PIANO-PLAYING ISN'T ALWAYS MUSIC"]
"Nevertheless it is a pastime of perdition," insisted Mr. Whitechoker.
"No, it isn't," retorted the Idiot. "Smoking is the business of
perdition. It smokes because it has to."
"There! there!" remonstrated Mr. Pedagog.
"You mean hear! hear! I presume," said the Idiot.
"I mean that you have said enough!" remarked Mr. Pedagog, sharply.
"Very well," said the Idiot. "If I have convinced you all I am satisfied,
not to say gratified. But really, Mr. Pedagog," he added, rising to leave
the room, "if I were you I'd give up the practice of chewing--"
"Hold on a minute, Mr. Idiot," said Mr. Whitechoker, interrupting. He was
desirous that Mr. Pedagog should not be further irritated. "Let me ask
you one question. Does your old father smoke?"
"No," said the Idiot, leaning easily over the back of his chair--"no.
What of it?"
"Nothing at all--except that perhaps if he could get along without it you
might," suggested the clergyman.
"He couldn't get along without it if he knew what good tobacco was," said
the Idiot.
"Then why don't you introduce him to it?" asked the Minister.
"Because I do not wish to make him unhappy," returned the Idiot, softly.
"He thinks his seventy years have been the happiest years that any mortal
ever had, and if now in his seventy-first year he discovered that during
the whole period of his manhood he had been deprived through ignorance of
so great a blessing as a good cigar, he'd become like the rest of us,
living in anticipation of delights to come, and not finding approximate
bliss in living over the past. Trust me, my dear Mr. Whitechoker, to look
after him. He and my mother and my life are all I have."
The Idiot left the room, and Mr. Pedagog put in a greater part of the
next half-hour in making personal statements to the remaining boarders to
the effect that the word he used was eschewed, and not the one attributed
to him by the Idiot.
Strange to say, most of them were already aware of that fact.