A Being Darkly Wise

Mr. Gorch, in that delightful, forgotten book, The Pedagogues, reproaches his fiancée with having lost ‘that air of faith and admiration.’ Had it been his pleasant fate to be engaged to J— or to me, he could never have taxed us thus, or lodged a legitimate complaint of any such description against us. With more justice he might have reproved a tendency in us to dispense our admiration too widely among mankind — might have repeated, with a different meaning, the words of the great mystic: ‘But what have I to do with genera and species?’ Because it is not the particular eminences, but the general level, of manly genius, which we more than daily celebrate in our wellneighbored house. It is the average man’s clairvoyant understanding of any and all contraptions; his insight into those cryptographs known as ‘Directions,’ and his ability always to answer the question, ‘How in the name of sense does this thing work?’

Raying out from the house of our neighbor, Mr. Darling, as if placed on the spokes of an invisible wheel, are a number of residences besides ours, of unmanned women. We try to observe a tacit convention to take turn and turn about with burst pipes, peculiar-sounding boilers, mysterious leaks on ceilings, and the like, so that only one head at a time, hooded in shawl or apron, shall project itself ahead of its flying galoshes, as we ‘run over to get Mr. Darling.’

‘O Mr. Darling, that dining-room shutter’s off again, and I can’t get both the spikes in at once — I’ve tried and tried. I did hate so to bother you.’

‘O Mr. Darling, the bung’s jumped out of the vinegar barrel, and I can’t find the spigot — it’s running all over the cellar.’

‘ Mr. Darling, the clothes-line’s down, and none of us can reach the hook!’

‘O Mr. Darling! Mr. Darling! Can you just step over and see if you smell smoke anywhere about the house?’

His interest is immediate, though his calmness is unperturbed. Unhasting, unresting is his stride across the dandelions. Without one backward look he lays his hose down on the lawn, leaves his pruning-knife hanging in the tree. He is three minutes on our premises and the clothes-line is taut, the spigot in, vinegar-tight, and the smell of burning exorcised.

Mr. Darling in the autumn often goes away on business—a ticklish time for us, and one when it almost seems that he is inconsiderate to leave us. J —— and I, during one of these intervals, undertook the purchase of a hanging lamp. It was foolhardy of us to think of such a thing while Mr. Darling was away! The directions were models of their kind for ambiguity. In tipsy and topheavy fashion we got the complicated chains and framework suspended, but it was plainly an innovation on the original design. It had an indescribably menacing look. J-returned to the formula of those precarious days when the Darling house had been still untenanted: ‘Go and look up and down the road and see if there’s a man in sight.’

One of our windows commands a stretch of sidewalk toward the village. Slowly advancing from that quarter I saw the aged Town Clerk. It is true that he has spent all his life among deeds, licenses, and books of record. But mechanical directions, which are written exclusively by men and for men, all men, by some faculty higher than reason or experience, understand. The Town Clerk in the course of time entered our living-room, examined the evidence and said gently, —

‘You ladies have hung it, in a way, kind of upside down.’

Men possess knowledge, exact knowledge, of conditions they have never seen. Farmers who never invest understand clearly the difference between stocks and bonds. Men bred in cities know growing wheat from rye and both from oats.

Men have an innate knowledge of geography, which every teacher will certify has not been learned in school. Before the war they knew where and which the Balkans were, and now they know the location of Esthonia and Livonia. Something is conveyed to their minds by the Cameroons. They can put their finger on Persia.

But these are not the highest grounds of our well-tested faith and admiration. It is not masculine intuitions, but masculine deportment, which must for ever be the envy and the rest of every woman’s heart. Men are unmoved by embarrassing situations; by sudden prominence given them when they are ill-dressed and untidy; by the unsoftened protuberances of their figures; by attacks upon them in editorials, or badgering upon the witness-stand. They are not even aware of the non-receipt of an invitation. They can argue, argue hotly, and not weep.

They receive with equanimity the frankest, most devastating comment on their extravagances. If satisfied before the attack, they remain satisfied still — all Briggs’s cartoons to the contrary. Those smiles so Olympian that they cannot be demeaned by calling them grins remain upon their faces, and arc, to those wives who have jointly experienced the attack, like the twelve wells and the seventy palms of Elim. But even when secretly regretful, they show no ponderable disgust, when they are told how surely it was the act of one without wits to purchase so poor an article at so high a price. They drive off, calmly ruminating, ‘P’raps, I have been stung.’ They will tell indiscriminately, and that without perceptible wincing, what they paid

Men must be very sure of immortality, thus calmly to move through the changes and chances of this mortal life. Or else they are all, in some degree, Emersons: they trust themselves; their firm hearts 'vibrate to that iron string.’