Leaves in the Wind. Gardiner Alfred George
it was necessary to his work. "The art of diplomacy," he said, "is the judicious administration of tobacco." No one knew better how to handle a cigar case than Bismarck, and it is no very extravagant fancy to see in the events of to-day the enormous fruit of an interlude of tobacco between him and Disraeli in the council chamber at Berlin.
There are some who say they smoke because it soothes their nerves, and others who say they smoke because it is an aid to social intercourse. It is true that you can sit and smoke and say nothing without feeling that the spirit of communion is broken. That was the case of Carlyle and his mother and of Carlyle and Tennyson, brave smokers all and silent to boot. They let their pipes carry on a conversation too deep for words. And lesser people, as Cowper knew, conceal their bankruptcy of words in wreaths of smoke:
The pipe, with solemn, interposing puff,
Makes half a sentence at a time enough;
The dozing sages drop the drowsy strain,
Then pause, and puff, and speak, and puff again.
And, while some say they smoke for company, others claim to smoke for thought and inspiration. "Tobacco is the sister of Literature," says Sir Walter Raleigh, loyal in this to his great namesake who brought the good gift to our shores. Heaven forbid that I should deny the debt we who write owe to tobacco, but I am bound to confess that brother Literature did some handsome things before he found his sister. Homer and Euripides, Virgil and Horace wrote quite tolerably without the help of tobacco, though no one can read Horace without feeling that he had the true spirit of the tobacco cult. Had he been born a couple of thousand years later, what praises of the weed of Havana he would have mingled with his praises of Falernian!
But if we are honest with ourselves we shall admit that we smoke not for this or that respectable reason – not always even because we enjoy it – but because we have got into the habit and can't get out of it. And in this, as in other cases, it is the surrender of the will more than the thing yielded to that is the mischief. All the great systems of religion have provided against the enslavement of the individual to his habits. The ordinances of abstinence are designed, in part at all events, to keep the will master of the appetites. They are intended – altogether apart from the question of salvation by works – to serve as a breach with habits which, if allowed uninterrupted sway, reduce the soul to a sort of bondage to the body.
It is against that bondage of habit that I have warred to-day. I shall not describe the incidents of the struggle: the allurements of the tobacconists' shops – and what a lot of tobacconists' shops there are! – the insidious temptation of a company of men smoking contentedly after lunch, the heroism of waving away the offered cigarette or cigar as though it were a matter of no importance, the constant act of refusal. For this is no case of one splendid deed of heroism. You do not slay Apollyon with a thrust of your sword and march triumphantly on your way. You have to go on fighting every inch of the journey, deaf to the appeals of Gold Flake and Capstan and Navy Cut and the other syrens that beckon you from the shop windows. And now evening has come and the victory is mine. I have singed the beard of the giant. I am no longer his thrall. To-morrow I shall be able to smoke with a clear conscience – with the feeling that it is an act of my own free choice, and not an act of slavish obedience to an old habit…
How I shall enjoy to-morrow!
THE GREAT GOD GUN
A few days ago I saw the Advent of the Great God Gun. The goddess Aphrodite, according to ancient mythology, rose out of the foam of the sea, and the Great God Gun, too, emerged from a bath, but it was a bath of fire – fire so white and intense that the eyes were blinded by it as they are blinded by the light of the unclouded sun at midday.
Our presence had been timed for the moment of his coming. We stood in a great chamber higher than a cathedral nave, and with something even less than the dim religious light of a cathedral nave. The exterior of the temple was plain even to ugliness, a tower of high, windowless walls faced with corrugated iron. Within was a maze of immense mysteries, mighty cylinders towering into the gloom above, great pits descending into the gloom below, gigantic cranes showing against the dim skylight, with here and there a Cyclopean figure clad in oily overalls and with a face grimy and perspiring.
The signal was given. Two shadowy figures that appeared in the darkness above one of the cylinders began their incantations. A giant crane towered above them and one saw its mighty claw descend into the orifice of the cylinder as if to drag some Eurydice out of the hell within. Then the word was spoken and somewhere a lever, or perhaps only an electric button, was touched. But at that touch the whole front of the mighty cylinder from top to bottom opened and swung back slowly and majestically, and one stood before a pillar of flame forty feet high, pure and white, an infinity of intolerable light, from whence a wave of heat came forth like a living thing. And as the door opened the Cyclops above – strange Dantesque figures now swallowed up in the gloom, now caught in the light of the furnace – set the crane in motion, and through the open door of the cylinder came the god, suspended from the claw of the crane that gripped it like the fingers of a hand.
It emerged slowly like a column of solid light – mystic, wonderful. All night it had stood imprisoned in the cylinder enveloped by that bath of incalculable hotness, and as it came out from the ordeal, it was as white as the furnace within. The great hand of the crane bore it forward with a solemn slowness until it paused over the mouth of one of the pits. I had looked into this pit and seen that it was filled nearly to the brim with a slimy liquid. It was a pit of oil – tens of thousands of gallons of high-flash rape oil. It was the second bath of the god.
The monster, the whiteness of his heat now flushing to pink, paused above the pit. Then gravely, under the direction of the iron hand that held him suspended in mid-air, he began to descend into the oil. The breech end of the incandescent column touched the surface of the liquid, and at that touch there leapt out of the mouth of the pit great tongues of flame. As the red pillar sank deeper and deeper in the pit the flames burst up through the muzzle and licked with fury about the ruthless claw as if to tear it to pieces. But it would not let go. Lower and lower sank the god until even his head was submerged and he stood invisible beneath us, robed in his cloak of oil.
And there we will leave him to toughen and harden as he drinks in the oil hungrily through his burning pores. Soon he will be caught up in the claw of the crane again, lifted out of his bath and lowered into an empty pit near by. And upon him will descend another tube, that has passed through the same trials, and that will fit him as the skin fits the body. And then in due course he will be provided with yet another coat. Round and round him will be wound miles of flattened wire, put on at a tension of unthinkable resistance. And even then there remains his outer garment, his jacket, to swell still further his mighty bulk. After that he will be equipped with his brain – all the wonderful mechanism of breech and cradle – and then one day he will be carried to the huge structure near by, where the Great God Gun, in all his manifestations, from the little mountain ten-pounder to the leviathan fifteen-inch, rests shining and wonderful, to be sent forth with his message of death and destruction.
The savage, we are told, is misguided enough to "bow down to wood and stone." Poor savage! If we could only take him, with his childlike intelligence, into our temple to see the god that the genius and industry of civilised man has created, a god so vast that a hundred men could not lift him, of such incredible delicacy that his myriad parts are fitted together to the thousandth, the ten-thousandth, and even the hundred-thousandth of an inch, and out of whose throat there issue thunders and lightnings that carry ruin for tens of miles – how ashamed the poor savage would be of his idols of wood and stone! How he would abase himself before the god of the Christian nations!
And what a voracious deity he is! Here in the great arsenal of Woolwich one passes through miles and miles of bewildering activities, foundries where the forty-ton hammer falls with the softness of a caress upon the great column of molten metal, and gives it the first crude likeness of the god, where vast converters are sending out flames of an unearthly hue and brightness, or where men clothed in grime and perspiration are swinging about billets of steel that scorch you as they pass from the furnace to the steam-press in which they are stamped like putty into the rough shape of great shells; shops where the roar of thousands of lathes drowns the voice, and where the food of the god is passing through