The Magical Chance

by Dallas Lore Sharp

I

A young man sat by the roadside, milking. And as he milked, one drove up in her limousine and stopped and said unto him:

“Young man, why are you not at the front?”

The young man milked on, for that was the thing to do. Then, with still more slackers in her voice, the woman said a second time unto him:

“Young man, why are you not at the front?”

“Because, ma’am, the milk is at this end,” he answered.

And the chauffeur, throwing the clutch of the limousine into third speed ahead, drove off, thinking.

But the young man milking had already thought. To milk is to think. If “darning is premeditated poverty,” then there is no saner occupation for human hands, none more thought-inducing, unless it be milking. Anyhow, when the Great War came on, I went over to a neighbor’s and bought a cow; I made me a new milking-stool with spread sturdy legs; and I sat down to face the situation calmly, where I might see it steadily and whole. I had tried the professorial chair; I had tried the editorial chair; I had even tried that Siege Perilous, the high-backed, soft-seated chair of plush behind the pulpit. I may never preach again; but if I do, it will be on condition that I sit on a three-legged milking stool instead of on that upholstered pillowy throne of plush.

Whence cometh wisdom? and where is the place of understanding? The flaming flambeaux on the Public Library say, “The light is in here”; the Φ B K key in the middle of the professorial waistcoat says, “It is in here.” But I say, let the flambeaux be replaced by round-headed stocking-darners, as the sign of premeditated poverty; and the dangling Key by a miniature milking-stool, as the symbol of the wisdom that knows which end of a cow to milk.

Not one of those students in the University who earned Φ B K last year knew how to milk, and only a few, I believe, of their professors. One of these, with a Ph.D. from Germany, whose key had charmed his students across their whole college course, asked me what breed of cattle heifers were. Might not his teaching have been quite as practical, had there dangled from his watch-chain those four years, not this key to the catacombs of knowledge, but a little jeweled milking-stool?

I too might wear a key, especially as I came innocently by mine, having had one thrust upon me; still, as I was born on a farm, and grew up in the fields, and am likely to end my days as I have lived them, here in the woods, this Φ B K key does not fit the lock to the door of knowledge that opens widest to me.

I have read a little on the aorist tense, and on the Ygdrasyl tree; a little, I say, on many things, from the animal aardvark, here and there, to zythum, a soft drink of the ancient Egyptians, picking a few rusty locks with this skeleton key; but the doors that open wide at my approach are those to my house, my barn, and the unwithholding fields. I know the road home, clear to the end; I know profoundly to come in when it rains; and I move with absolute certainty to the right end of the cow when it is time to milk.

I am aware of a certain arrogance in this, a show of pride, and that unbottomed pomp of those who wear the Φ B K key dangling at their vests,—as if I could milk any cow! or might have in my barn the world’s champion cow! I have only a grade Jersey in my barn; and as for milking heifers with their first calves—I have milked them. But breaking in a heifer is really a young man’s job.

So I find myself at the middle of my years, stripped of outward signs, as I hope I am inwardly purged, of all vain shows of wisdom (quite too humble, truly!), falling in as unnaturally as the birds with the fool daylight-saving plan, the ways of the sun, who knoweth his going down, being quite good enough for me.