“Aha! I hear you become an invalid, my dear sir.” With that the professor’s great bulk loomed in the doorway against the glare outside. “I have come to condole with you, if you allow it.”
“To smoke with me, too, I hope,” I said, not a little pleased.
“That I will do,” he returned, and came in slowly, walking with perceptible lameness. “The sympathy I offer is genuine: it is not only from the heart, it is from the latissimus dorsi” he continued, seating himself with a cavernous groan. “I am your confrere in illness, my dear sir. I have choosed this fine weather for rheumatism of the back.”
“I hope it is not painful.”
“Ha, it is so-so,” he rumbled, removing his spectacles and wiping his eyes, dazzled by the sun. “There is more of me than of most men—more to suffer. Nature was generous to the little germs when she made this big Keredec; she offered them room for their campaigns of war.”
“You’ll take a cigarette?”
“I thank you; if you do not mind, I smoke my pipe.”
He took from his pocket a worn leather case, which he opened, disclosing a small, browned clay bowl of the kind workmen use; and, fitting it with a red stem, he filled it with a dark and sinister tobacco from a pouch. “Always my pipe for me,” he said, and applied a match, inhaling the smoke as other men inhale the light smoke of cigarettes. “Ha, it is good! It is wicked for the insides, but it is good for the soul.” And clouds wreathed his great beard like a storm on Mont Blanc as he concluded, with gusto, “It is my first pipe since yesterday.”
“That is being a good smoker,” I ventured sententiously; “to whet indulgence with abstinence.”
“My dear sir,” he protested, “I am a man without even enough virtue to be an epicure. When I am alone I am a chimney with no hebdomadary repose; I smoke forever. It is on account of my young friend I am temperate now.”