Part 14 (2/2)

I admitted his premise.

”Very well,” he continued. ”Now I, as you know, smoke them all day long, and enjoy them. Why? Because I have got into the habit. Years ago, when I was a young man, I smoked expensive Havanas. I found that I was ruining myself. It was absolutely necessary that I should take a cheaper weed. I was living in Belgium at the time, and a friend showed me these.

I don't know what they are--probably cabbage leaves soaked in guano; they tasted to me like that at first--but they were cheap. Buying them by the five hundred, they cost me three a penny. I determined to like them, and started with one a day. It was terrible work, I admit, but as I said to myself, nothing could be worse than the Havanas themselves had been in the beginning. Smoking is an acquired taste, and it must be as easy to learn to like one flavour as another. I persevered and I conquered.

Before the year was over I could think of them without loathing, at the end of two I could smoke them without positive discomfort. Now I prefer them to any other brand on the market. Indeed, a good cigar disagrees with me.”

I suggested it might have been less painful to have given up smoking altogether.

”I did think of it,” he replied, ”but a man who doesn't smoke always seems to me bad company. There is something very sociable about smoke.”

He leant back and puffed great clouds into the air, filling the small den with an odour suggestive of bilge water and cemeteries.

”Then again,” he resumed after a pause, ”take my claret. No, you don't like it.” (I had not spoken, but my face had evidently betrayed me.) ”n.o.body does, at least no one I have ever met. Three years ago, when I was living in Hammersmith, we caught two burglars with it. They broke open the sideboard, and swallowed five bottlefuls between them. A policeman found them afterwards, sitting on a doorstep a hundred yards off, the 'swag' beside them in a carpet bag. They were too ill to offer any resistance, and went to the station like lambs, he promising to send the doctor to them the moment they were safe in the cells. Ever since then I have left out a decanterful upon the table every night.

”Well, I like that claret, and it does me good. I come in sometimes dead beat. I drink a couple of gla.s.ses, and I'm a new man. I took to it in the first instance for the same reason that I took to the cigars--it was cheap. I have it sent over direct from Geneva, and it costs me six s.h.i.+llings a dozen. How they do it I don't know. I don't want to know.

As you may remember, it's fairly heady and there's body in it.

”I knew one man,” he continued, ”who had a regular Mrs. Caudle of a wife.

All day long she talked to him, or at him, or of him, and at night he fell asleep to the rising and falling rhythm of what she thought about him. At last she died, and his friends congratulated him, telling him that now he would enjoy peace. But it was the peace of the desert, and the man did not enjoy it. For two-and-twenty years her voice had filled the house, penetrated through the conservatory, and floated in faint shrilly waves of sound round the garden, and out into the road beyond.

The silence now pervading everywhere frightened and disturbed him. The place was no longer home to him. He missed the breezy morning insult, the long winter evening's reproaches beside the flickering fire. At night he could not sleep. For hours he would lie tossing restlessly, his ears aching for the accustomed soothing flow of invective.

”'Ah!' he would cry bitterly to himself, 'it is the old story, we never know the value of a thing until we have lost it.'

”He grew ill. The doctors dosed him with sleeping draughts in vain. At last they told him bluntly that his life depended upon his finding another wife, able and willing to nag him to sleep.

”There were plenty of wives of the type he wanted in the neighbourhood, but the unmarried women were, of necessity, inexperienced, and his health was such that he could not afford the time to train them.

”Fortunately, just as despair was about to take possession of him, a man died in the next parish, literally talked to death, the gossip said, by his wife. He obtained an introduction, and called upon her the day after the funeral. She was a cantankerous old woman, and the wooing was a hara.s.sing affair, but his heart was in his work, and before six months were gone he had won her for his own.

”She proved, however, but a poor subst.i.tute. The spirit was willing but the flesh was weak. She had neither that command of language nor of wind that had distinguished her rival. From his favourite seat at the bottom of the garden he could not hear her at all, so he had his chair brought up into the conservatory. It was all right for him there so long as she continued to abuse him; but every now and again, just as he was getting comfortably settled down with his pipe and his newspaper, she would suddenly stop.

”He would drop his paper and sit listening, with a troubled, anxious expression.

”'Are you there, dear?' he would call out after a while.

”'Yes, I'm here. Where do you think I am you old fool?' she would gasp back in an exhausted voice.

”His face would brighten at the sound of her words. 'Go on, dear,' he would answer. 'I'm listening. I like to hear you talk.'

”But the poor woman was utterly pumped out, and had not so much as a snort left.

”Then he would shake his head sadly. 'No, she hasn't poor dear Susan's flow,' he would say. 'Ah! what a woman that was!'

”At night she would do her best, but it was a lame and halting performance by comparison. After rating him for little over three-quarters of an hour, she would sink back on the pillow, and want to go to sleep. But he would shake her gently by the shoulder.

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