My Lady Nicotine | Page 3

my
position an inch at a time. Less frequently I felt this sting in the
daytime, and believed I was dying while my friends were talking to me.
I never mentioned these experiences to a human being; indeed, though
a medical man was among my companions, I cunningly deceived him
on the rare occasions when he questioned me about the amount of
tobacco I was consuming weekly. Often in the dark I not only vowed to
give up smoking, but wondered why I cared for it. Next morning I went
straight from breakfast to my pipe, without the smallest struggle with
myself. Latterly I knew, while resolving to break myself of the habit,
that I would be better employed trying to sleep. I had elaborate ways of
cheating myself, but it became disagreeable to me to know how many
ounces of tobacco I was smoking weekly. Often I smoked cigarettes to

reduce the number of my cigars.
On the other hand, if these sharp pains be excepted, I felt quite well.
My appetite was as good as it is now, and I worked as cheerfully and
certainly harder. To some slight extent, I believe, I experienced the
same pains in my boyhood, before I smoked, and I am not an absolute
stranger to them yet. They were most frequent in my smoking days, but
I have no other reason for charging them to tobacco. Possibly a doctor
who was himself a smoker would have pooh-poohed them.
Nevertheless, I have lighted my pipe, and then, as I may say, hearkened
for them. At the first intimation that they were coming I laid the pipe
down and ceased to smoke--until they had passed.
I will not admit that, once sure it was doing me harm, I could not,
unaided, have given up tobacco. But I was reluctant to make sure. I
should like to say that I left off smoking because I considered it a mean
form of slavery, to be condemned for moral as well as physical reasons;
but though now I clearly see the folly of smoking, I was blind to it for
some months after I had smoked my last pipe. I gave up my most
delightful solace, as I regarded it, for no other reason than that the lady
who was willing to fling herself away on me said that I must choose
between it and her. This deferred our marriage for six months.
I have now come, as those who read will see, to look upon smoking
with my wife's eyes. My old bachelor friends complain because I do
not allow smoking in the house, but I am always ready to explain my
position, and I have not an atom of pity for them. If I cannot smoke
here neither shall they. When I visit them in the old inn they take a poor
revenge by blowing rings of smoke almost in my face. This ambition to
blow rings is the most ignoble known to man. Once I was a member of
a club for smokers, where we practised blowing rings. The most
successful got a box of cigars as a prize at the end of the year. Those
were days! Often I think wistfully of them. We met in a cozy room off
the Strand. How well I can picture it still. Time-tables lying
everywhere, with which we could light our pipes. Some smoked clays,
but for the Arcadia Mixture give me a brier. My brier was the sweetest
ever known. It is strange now to recall a time when a pipe seemed to be

my best friend.
My present state is so happy that I can only look back with wonder at
my hesitation to enter upon it. Our house was taken while I was still
arguing that it would be dangerous to break myself of smoking all at
once. At that time my ideal of married life was not what it is now, and I
remember Jimmy's persuading me to fix on this house, because the
large room upstairs with the three windows was a smoker's dream. He
pictured himself and me there in the summer-time blowing rings, with
our coats off and our feet out at the windows; and he said that the closet
at the back looking on to a blank wall would make a charming
drawing-room for my wife. For the moment his enthusiasm carried me
away, but I see now how selfish it was, and I have before me the face
of Jimmy when he paid us his first visit and found that the closet was
not the drawing-room. Jimmy is a fair specimen of a man, not without
parts, destroyed by devotion to his pipe. To this day he thinks that
mantelpiece vases are meant for holding pipe-lights in. We are