(Cigars and cigarettes as occasion may require.)
The matter of smoking after dinner requires consideration. If your meal
is a heavy, stupefying anodyne, retracting all the humane energies from
the skull in a forced abdominal mobilization to quell a plethora of food
into subjection and assimilation, there is no power of speculation left
in the top storeys. You sink brutishly into an armchair, warm your legs
at the fire, and let the leucocytes and phagocytes fight it out. At such
times smoking becomes purely mechanical. You imbibe and exhale the fumes
automatically. The choicest aromatic blends are mere fuel. Your eyes
see, but your brain responds not. The vital juices, generous currents,
or whatever they are that animate the intelligence, are down below
hatches fighting furiously to annex and drill into submission the alien
and distracting mass of food that you have taken on board. They are like
stevedores, stowing the cargo for portability. A little later, however,
when this excellent work is accomplished, the bosun may trill his
whistle, and the deck hands can be summoned back to the navigating
bridge. The mind casts off its corporeal hawsers and puts out to sea.
You begin once more to live as a rational composition of reason,
emotion, and will. The heavy dinner postpones and stultifies this
desirable state. Let it then be said that light dining is best: a little
fish or cutlets, white wine, macaroni and cheese, ice cream and coffee.
Such a régime restores the animal health, and puts you in vein for a
continuance of intellect.
Smoking is properly an intellectual exercise. It calls forth the
choicest qualities of mind and soul. It can only be properly conducted
by a being in full possession of the five wits. For those who are in
pain, sorrow, or grievous perplexity it operates as a sovereign
consoler, a balm and balsam to the harassed spirit; it calms the
fretful, makes jovial the peevish. Better than any ginseng in the
herbal, does it combat fatigue and old age. Well did Stevenson exhort
virgins not to marry men who do not smoke.
Now we approach the crux and pinnacle of this inquirendo into the art
and mystery of smoking. That is to say, the last pipe of all before the
so-long indomitable intellect abdicates, and the body succumbs to
weariness.
No man of my acquaintance has ever given me a satisfactory definition of
_living_. An alternating systole and diastole, says physiology.
Chlorophyl becoming xanthophyl, says botany. These stir me not. I define
life as a process of the Will-to-Smoke: recurring periods of
consciousness in which the enjoyability of smoking is manifest,
interrupted by intervals of recuperation.
Now if I represent the course of this process by a graph (the co-ordinates
being Time and the Sense-of-by-the-Smoker-enjoyed-Satisfaction) the curve
ascends from its origin in a steep slant, then drops away abruptly at the
recuperation interval. This is merely a teutonic and pedantic mode of
saying that the best pipe of all is the last one smoked at night. It is
the penultimate moment that is always the happiest. The sweetest pipe
ever enjoyed by the skipper of the _Hesperus_ was the one he whiffed just
before he was tirpitzed by the poet on that angry reef.
The best smoking I ever do is about half past midnight, just before "my
eyelids drop their shade," to remind you again of your primary school
poets. After the toils, rebuffs, and exhilarations of the day, after
piaffing busily on the lethal typewriter or _schreibmaschine_ for some
hours, a drowsy languor begins to numb the sense. In dressing gown and
slippers I seek my couch; Ho, Lucius, a taper! and some solid,
invigorating book for consideration. My favourite is the General
Catalogue of the Oxford University Press: a work so excellently full of
learning; printed and bound with such eminence of skill; so noble a
repository or Thesaurus of the accumulated treasures of human learning,
that it sets the mind in a glow of wonder. This is the choicest garland
for the brain fatigued with the insignificant and trifling tricks by
which we earn our daily bread. There is no recreation so lovely as that
afforded by books rich in wisdom and ribbed with ripe and sober
research. This catalogue (nearly 600 pages) is a marvellous précis of
the works of the human spirit. And here and there, buried in a scholarly
paragraph, one meets a topical echo: "THE OXFORD SHAKESPEARE GLOSSARY:
by C.T. ONIONS: Mr. Onions' glossary, offered at an insignificant price,
relieves English scholarship of the necessity of recourse to the
lexicon of Schmidt." Lo, how do even professors and privat-docents
belabour one another!
With due care I fill, pack, and light the last pipe of the day, to be
smoked reverently and solemnly in bed. The thousand brain-murdering
interruptions are over. The gentle sibilance of air drawn through the
glowing nest of tobacco is the only sound. With reposeful heart I turn
to some favourite entry in my well-loved catalogue.
"HENRY PEACHAM'S COMPLEAT GENTLEMAN. Fashioning him absolut in the most
necessary and Commendable Qualities concerning Minde, or Body, that may
be required in a Noble Gentleman. Wherunto is annexed a Description of
the order of a Maine Battaile or Pitched Field, eight severall wayes,
with the Art of Limming and other Additions newly Enlarged. Printed from
the edition of 1634; first edition, 1622, with an introduction by G. S.
Gordon. 1906. Pp xxiv + 16 unpaged + 262. 7s. 6d. net. _At the Clarendon
Press_."
Or this:
"H. HIS DEVISES, for his owne exercise, and his Friends pleasure.
Printed from the edition of 1581, with an introduction. 1906. Pp xviii +
104. 5s. net."
O excellent H! Little did he dream that his devises (with an
introduction by Professor Sir Walter Raleigh) would be still giving his
Friends pleasure over three hundred years later. The compiler of the
catalogue says here with modest and pardonable pride "strongly bound in
exceptionally tough paper and more than once described by reviewers as
leather. Some of the books are here printed for the first time, the rest
are reproductions of the original editions, many having prefaces by good
hands."
One o'clock is about to chime in the near-by steeple, but my pipe and
curiosity are now both going strong.
"THE CURES OF THE DISEASED in remote Regions, preventing Mortalitie
incident in Forraine Attempts of the English Nation. 1598. The earliest
English treatise on tropical diseases. 1915. 1s. 6d. net."
Is that not the most interesting comment on the English colonial
enterprises in Elizabeth's reign? And there is no limit to the joys of
this marvellous catalogue. How one dreams of the unknown delights of
"Two Fifteenth-Century Cookery Books," or "Dan Michel's Ayenbite of
Inwyt, 1340" (which means, as I figure it, the "Backbite of
Conscience"), or "Origenis Hexaplorum quae supersunt sive Veterum
Interpretum Graecorum in totum Vetus Testamentum Fragmenta, edidit F.
Field. 1865. Two volumes £6 6s. net" or "Shuckford's Sacred and Profane
History of the World, from the Creation of the World to the Dissolution
of the Assyrian Empire at the death of Sardanapalus, and to the
Declension of The Kingdom of Judah and Israel under the Reigns of Ahaz
and Pekah, with the Creation and Fall of Man. 1728, reprinted 1848. Pp
550. 10s. net."
But I dare not force my hobbies on you further. One man's meat is
another's caviar. I dare not even tell you what my favourite tobaccos
are, for recently when I sold to a magazine a very worthy and excellent
poem entitled "My Pipe," mentioning the brands I delight to honour, the
editor made me substitute fictitious names for my dearly loved blends.
He said that sound editorial policy forbids mentioning commercial
products in the text of the magazine.
But tobacco, thank heaven, is not merely a "commercial product." Let us
call on Salvation Yeo for his immortal testimony:
"When all things were made none was made better than this; to be a lone
man's companion, a bachelor's friend, a hungry man's food, a sad man's
cordial, a wakeful man's sleep, and a chilly man's fire, sir; while for
stanching of wounds, purging of rheum, and settling of the stomach,
there's no herb like unto it under the canopy of heaven."
And by this time the bowl is naught but ash. Even my dear General
Catalogue begins to blur before me. Slip it under the pillow; gently and
kindly lay the pipe in the candlestick, and blow out the flame. The
window is open wide: the night rushes in. I see a glimpse of stars ... a
distant chime ... and fall asleep with the faint pungence of the Indian
herb about me.