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.
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 ship 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 space 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_."
[Illustration: "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 debasement. 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
advertisements 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 advertisement 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 advertisement. 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."
"There you are right," said Mr. Pedagog, approvingly. "There is
absolutely no limit to the possibilities involved. It is almost within
the range of possibilities that some man may yet invent a buckwheat cake
that will satisfy your abnormal craving for that delicacy, which the
present total output of this table seems unable to do."
Here Mr. Pedagog turned to his wife, and added: "My dear, will you
request the cook hereafter to prepare individual cakes for us? The Idiot
has so far monopolized all that have as yet appeared."
"It appears to me," said the Idiot at this point, "that _you_ are the
ramifier, Mr. Pedagog. Nevertheless, ramify as much as you please. I can
follow you--at a safe distance, of course--in the discussion of anything,
from Edison to flapjacks. I think your suggestion regarding individual
cakes is a good one. We might all have separate griddles, upon which
Gladys, the cook, can prepare them, and on these griddles might be cast
in bold relief the crest of each member of this household, so that every
man's cake should, by an easy process in the making, come off the fire
indelibly engraved with the evidence of its destiny. Mr. Pedagog's iron,
for instance, might have upon it a school-book rampant, or a large head
in the same condition. Mr. Whitechoker's cake-mark might be a pulpit
rampant, based upon a vestryman dormant. The Doctor might have a lozengy
shield with a suitable tincture, while my genial friend who occasionally
imbibes could have a barry shield surmounted by a small effigy of
Gambrinus."
"You appear to know something of heraldry," said the poet, with a look of
surprise.
"I know something of everything," said the Idiot, complacently.
"It's a pity you don't know everything about something," sneered the
Doctor.
"I would suggest," said the School-Master, dryly, "that a little rampant
jackass would make a good crest for your cakes."
"That's a very good idea," said the Idiot. "I do not know but that a
jackass rampant would be about as comprehensive of my virtues as anything
I might select. The jackass is a combination of all the best qualities.
He is determined. He minds his own business. He doesn't indulge in
flippant conversation. He is useful. Has no vices, never pretends to be
anything but a jackass, and most respectfully declines to be ridden by
Tom, Dick, and Harry. I accept the suggestion of Mr. Pedagog with thanks.
But we are still ramifying. Let us get back to inventions. Now I fully
believe that the time is coming when some inventive genius will devise a
method whereby intellect can be given to those who haven't any. I believe
that the time is coming when the secrets of the universe will be yielded
up to man by nature."
[Illustration: "DECLINES TO BE RIDDEN"]
"And then?" queried Mr. Brief.
"Then some man will try to improve on the secrets of the universe. He
will try to invent an apparatus by means of which the rotation of the
world may be made faster or slower, according to his will. If he has but
one day, for instance, in which to do a stated piece of work, and he
needs two, he will put on some patent brake and slow the world up until
the distance travelled in one hour shall be reduced one-half, so that one
hour under the old system will be equivalent to two; or if he is
anticipating some joy, some diversion in the future, the same smart
person will find a way to increase the speed of the earth so that the
hours will be like minutes. Then he'll begin fooling with gravitation,
and he will discover a new-fashioned lodestone, which can be carried in
one's hat to counter-act the influence of the centre of gravity when one
falls out of a window or off a precipice, the result of which will be
that the person who falls off one of these high places will drop down
slowly, and not with the rapidity which at the present day is responsible
for the dreadful outcome of accidents of that sort. Then, finally--"
"You pretend to be able to penetrate to the finality, do you?" asked the
Clergyman.
"Why not? It is as easy to imagine the finality as it is to go half-way
there," returned the Idiot. "Finally he will tackle some elementary
principle of nature, and he'll blow the world to smithereens."
There was silence at the table. This at least seemed to be a tenable
theory. That man should have the temerity to take liberties with
elementary principles was quite within reason, man being an animal of
rare conceit, and that the result would bring about destruction was not
at all at variance with probability.
"I believe it's happened once or twice already," said the Idiot.
"Do you really?" asked Mr. Pedagog, with a show of interest. "Upon what
do you base this belief?"
"Well, take Africa," said the Idiot. "Take North America. What do we
find? We find in the sands of the Sahara a great statue, which we call
the Sphinx, and about which we know nothing, except that it is there and
that it keeps its mouth shut. We find marvellous creations in engineering
that to-day surpass anything that we can do. The Sphinx, when discovered,
was covered by sand. Now I believe that at one time there were people
much further advanced in science than ourselves, who made these wonderful
things, who knew how to do things that we don't even dream of doing, and
I believe that they, like this creature I have predicted, got fooling
with the centre of gravity, and that the world slipped its moorings for a
period of time, during which time it tumbled topsy-turvey into space, and
that banks and banks of sand and water and ice thrown out of position
simply swept on and over the whole surface of the globe continuously
until the earth got into the grip of the rest of the universe once more
and started along in a new orbit. We know that where we are high and dry
to-day the ocean must once have rolled. We know that where the world is
now all sunshine and flowers great glaciers stood. What caused all this
change? Nothing else, in my judgment, than the monkeying of man with the
forces of nature. The poles changed, and it wouldn't surprise me a bit
that, if the north pole were ever found and could be thawed out, we
should find embedded in that great sea of ice evidences of a former
civilization, just as in the Saharan waste evidences of the same thing
have been found. I know of a place out West that is literally strewn with
oyster-shells, and yet no man living has the slightest idea how they came
there. It may have been the Massachusetts Bay of a pre-historic time, for
all we know. It may have been an antediluvian Coney Island, for all the
world knows. Who shall say that this little upset of mine found here an
oyster-bed, shook all the oysters out of their bed into space, and left
their clothes high and dry in a locality which, but for those garments,
would seem never to have known the oyster in his prime? Off in
Westchester County, on the top of a high hill, lies a rock, and in the
uppermost portion of that rock is a so-called pot-hole, made by nothing
else than the dropping of water of a brook and the swirling of pebbles
therein. It is now beyond the reach of anything in the shape of water
save that which falls from the heavens. It is certain that this pot-hole
was never made by a boy with a watering-pot, by a hired man with a hose,
by a workman with a drill, or by any rain-storm that ever fell in
Westchester County. There must at some time or another have been a
stream there; and as streams do not flow uphill and bore pot-holes on
mountain-tops, there must have been a valley there. Some great cataclysm
took place. For that cataclysm nature must be held responsible mainly.
But what prompted nature to raise hob with Westchester County millions of
years ago, and to let it sleep like Rip Van Winkle ever since? Nature
isn't a freak. She is depicted as a woman, but in spite of that she is
not whimsical. She does not act upon impulses. There must have been some
cause for her behavior in turning valleys into hills, in transforming
huge cities into wastes of sand, and oyster-beds into shell quarries; and
it is my belief that man was the contributing cause. He tapped the earth
for natural gas; he bored in and he bored out, and he bored nature to
death, and then nature rose up and smote him and his cities and his
oyster-beds, and she'll do it again unless we go slow."
"There is a great deal in what you say," said Mr. Whitechoker.
"Very true," said Mrs. Pedagog. "But I wish he'd stop saying it. The last
three dozen cakes have got cold as ice while he was talking, and I can't
afford such reckless waste."
"Nor we, Mrs. Pedagog," said the Idiot, with a pleasant smile; "for, as I
was saying to the Bibliomaniac this morning, your buckwheat cakes are, to
my mind, the very highest development of our modern civilization, and to
have even one of them wasted seems to me to be a crime against Nature
herself, for which a second, third, or fourth shaking up of this earth
would be an inadequate punishment."
This remark so pleased Mrs. Pedagog that she ordered the cook to send up
a fresh lot of cakes; and the guests, after eating them, adjourned to
their various duties with light hearts, and digestions occupied with work
of great importance.