Curiously enough, I smoked my first cigar on the way to Havana, and could not finish it. It almost finished me. I used to say that cigars belonged to a certain later period in a man’s life, when he had succeeded and could lean back in his chair and view the world at ease. It is perhaps an English idea. Cigars in England are a luxury. But it is not so in other parts of the world. In England, when we smoke a cigar, we smoke largely tax. But in other parts of the world this choicer weed enjoys more freedom from impost. In Germany, in Austria, in Holland, in the Indies and Mexico, and in many other places, a cigar is no more a luxury than a cigarette—as cheap, as popular, and better to smoke.
Hood could write:
Honours have passed to men
My junior at the Bar.
No matter, I can wait,
So I have my cigar.
but he could hardly have written—So I have my cigarette. The cigar for us means Nirvana, release from cares, relaxation of the whole being. I do not think it either the meet reward or the need of the tramp after his day’s march. When he has had wordy warfare with the police concerning the validity of his passport, when he finds that he has lost all his money and half his kit, when he has proposed to his sweetheart and been rejected, or refused, he may light up a Havana if he has one. But I take comfort in the thought that unless he has lately parted from a rich uncle he is unlikely to have a stock of the commodity, and will draw rather upon the resources of philosophy which he has somehow stored within.
CHAPTER TWENTY
BOOKS