Part 8 (1/2)
”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 antic.i.p.ation 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.
X
”The progress of invention in this country has been very remarkable,”
said Mr. Pedagog, as he turned his attention from a scientific weekly he had been reading to a towering pile of buckwheat cakes that Mary had just brought in. ”An Englishman has just discovered a means by which a s.h.i.+p in distress at sea can write for help on the clouds.”
”Extraordinary!” said Mr. Whitechoker.
”It might be more so,” observed the Idiot, coaxing the platterful of cakes out of the School-Master's reach by a dexterous movement of his hand. ”And it will be more so some day. The time is coming when the moon itself will be used by some enterprising American to advertise his soap business. I haven't any doubt that the next fifty years will develop a stereopticon by means of which a picture of a certain brand of cigar may be projected through s.p.a.ce until it seems to be held between the teeth of the man in the moon, with a printed legend below it stating that this is _Tooforfivers Best, Rolled from Hand-made Tobacco, Warranted not to Crock or Fade, and for sale by All Tobacconists at Eighteen for a Dime_.”
[Ill.u.s.tration: ”THE MOON ITSELF WILL BE USED”]
”You would call that an advance in invention, eh?” asked the School-Master.
”Why not?” queried the Idiot.
”Do you consider the invention which would enable man to debase nature to the level of an advertising medium an advance?”
”I should not consider the use of the moon for the dissemination of good news a debas.e.m.e.nt. If the cigars were good--and I have no doubt that some one will yet invent a cheap cigar that is good--it would benefit the human race to be acquainted with that fact. I think sometimes that the advertis.e.m.e.nts in the newspapers and the periodicals of the day are of more value to the public than the reading-matter, so-called, that stands next to them. I don't see why you should sneer at advertising. I should never have known you, for instance, Mr. Pedagog, had it not been for Mrs.
Pedagog's advertis.e.m.e.nt offering board and lodging to single gentlemen for a consideration. Nor would you have met Mrs. Smithers, now your estimable wife, yourself, had it not been for that advertis.e.m.e.nt. Why, then, do you sneer at the ladder upon which you have in a sense climbed to your present happiness? You are ungrateful.”
”How you do ramify!” said Mr. Pedagog. ”I believe there is no subject in the world which you cannot connect in some way or another with every other subject in the world. A discussion of the merits of Shakespeare's sonnets could be turned by your dexterous tongue in five minutes into a quarrel over the comparative merits of cider and cod-liver oil as beverages, with you, the chances are, the advocate of cod-liver oil as a steady drink.”
”Well, I must say,” said the Idiot, with a smile, ”it has been my experience that cod-liver oil is steadier than cider. The cod-liver oils I have had the pleasure of absorbing have been evenly vile, while the ciders that I have drank have been of a variety of goodness, badness, and indifferentness which has brought me to the point where I never touch it. But to return to inventions, since you desire to limit our discussion to a single subject, I think it is about the most interesting field of speculation imaginable.”