hot and dreamy day, I sat down at a table in a sort
of beer-garden, and ordered a cigar and a pot of lager.
I drank the lager, and paid for it. I smoked
the cigar, forgot to pay for it, and walked away,
gazing rapturously at the royal outline of the Taunus
mountains. After about ten minutes, I suddenly
remembered that I had not paid for the cigar.
I went back to the place of refreshment, and put down
the money. But the proprietor also had forgotten
the cigar, and he merely said guttural things in a
tone of query, asking me, I suppose, what I wanted.
I said “cigar,” and he gave me a cigar.
I endeavoured while putting down the money to wave
away the cigar with gestures of refusal. He thought
that my rejection was of the nature of a condemnation
of that particular cigar, and brought me another.
I whirled my arms like a windmill, seeking to convey
by the sweeping universality of my gesture that my
rejection was a rejection of cigars in general, not
of that particular article. He mistook this for
the ordinary impatience of common men, and rushed
forward, his hands filled with miscellaneous cigars,
pressing them upon me. In desperation I tried
other kinds of pantomime, but the more cigars I refused
the more and more rare and precious cigars were brought
out of the deeps and recesses of the establishment.
I tried in vain to think of a way of conveying to him
the fact that I had already had the cigar. I
imitated the action of a citizen smoking, knocking
off and throwing away a cigar. The watchful proprietor
only thought I was rehearsing (as in an ecstasy of
anticipation) the joys of the cigar he was going to
give me. At last I retired baffled: he
would not take the money and leave the cigars alone.
So that this restaurant-keeper (in whose face a love
of money shone like the sun at noonday) flatly and
firmly refused to receive the twopence that I certainly
owed him; and I took that twopence of his away with
me and rioted on it for months. I hope that on
the last day the angels will break the truth very
gently to that unhappy man.
. . . . .
This is the true and exact account of the Great Cigar
Fraud, and the moral of it is this—that
civilisation is founded upon abstractions. The
idea of debt is one which cannot be conveyed by physical
motions at all, because it is an abstract idea.
And civilisation obviously would be nothing without
debt. So when hard-headed fellows who study scientific
sociology (which does not exist) come and tell you
that civilisation is material or indifferent to the
abstract, just ask yourselves how many of the things
that make up our Society, the Law, or the Stocks and
Shares, or the National Debt, you would be able to
convey with your face and your ten fingers by grinning
and gesticulating to a German innkeeper.
A Cab Ride Across Country
Sown somewhere far off in the shallow dales of Hertfordshire
there lies a village of great beauty, and I doubt
not of admirable virtue, but of eccentric and unbalanced
literary taste, which asked the present writer to
come down to it on Sunday afternoon and give an address.
