He leant back and puffed great clouds into the air, filled the small room with a terrible smell.
“Then again,” he continued after a pause, “Take my wine. No, you don’t like it.” (My face betrayed me.) “Nobody does, no one I have ever met. Three years ago, when I lived in Hammersmith, we caught two thieves with it. They opened the cupboard, and drank five bottles of it. A policeman found them later, sitting on a doorstep a hundred yards from my house. They were too ill and went to the police station like lambs, because he promised to send the doctor to them the moment they were safe in the cells. Since then I leave a bottle on the table every night.
Well, I like that wine. I drink several glasses, and I feel like I’m a new man. I took it for the same reason that I took the cigars – it was cheap. It is sent from Geneva, and it costs me six shillings a dozen of bottles. How they do it I don’t know. I don’t want to know.”
“I knew one man,” my friend continued, “All day long his wife talked to him, or at him, or of him, and at night he fell asleep to the rising and falling rhythm of what she thought about him. At last she died, and his friends congratulated him, they thought that now he would enjoy peace. But it was the peace of the desert, and the man did not enjoy it. For twenty-two years her voice had filled the house, penetrated through the conservatory, and floated into the garden.
The place was no longer home to him. He missed the fresh morning insult, the long winter evening’s reproaches beside the fire. At night he could not sleep. For hours he would lie without sleep.
‘Ah!’ he cried to himself, ‘it is the old story, we never know the value of a thing until we lose it.’ He grew ill. The doctors gave him tons of sleeping pills, but all in vain. At last they told him that his life depended on finding another wife.
There were plenty of wives of the type he wanted in the neighbourhood, but the unmarried women were not experienced, and his health was so bad that he did not have the time to train them.
Fortunately, a man died nearby, talked to death by his wife. He called her the day after the funeral and in six months he won her heart.
But she was a poor substitute.
From his favourite seat at the bottom of the garden he could not hear her at all, so he brought his chair into the conservatory. It was all right for him there while she continued to abuse him; but every time he got comfortably settled down with his pipe and his newspaper, she suddenly stopped.