“Washing your hands isn’t an instinct, you goose. It is an acquired superstition.”
“Well, so perhaps is tidiness. But anyhow it is a superstition founded on the Bible.”
“How?”
“Isn’t there something in it about keeping your house swept and garnished?”
I hooted. “No, that won’t do. That was the house that proved so attractive to the unclean spirit and his brethren. You are hoist with your own petard, I am afraid, my Fifinette.”
“O!” said Fifine. “Well, anyhow you won’t make me believe that tidiness is a sin.”
“No, it is only a ‘preparation’—for what? fresh untidiness, say I. When you have paid all your bills, and filed the receipts, and checked and balanced your bank book, and swept the hearth clean, and sat down with a satisfied sense of accumulated scores settled, and of being able to start again with a clean slate, what follows? Why, the falling of new ashes into the fender, and the recovering of the slate with the same old fatuous irreconcilabilities between receipt and expenditure.”
“Well, you know at least periodically how you stand, and where,” said Fifine; “and that is a consolation.”
How was it a consolation? How can a coat removed from the floor, say, and hung on a peg make one feel more sure of one’s position? I have often tried to understand, and cannot. Or is there really in the instinct some subtle feeling of the temporary sojourner in a strange land, prepared for eventualities, ready, because unencumbered, to move on at a moment’s notice? Travellers, explorers, are often the tidiest of men, clearing up behind them, as they advance, having its place for every article of their kit, and scrupulous to maintain it. To me, nevertheless, it is no comfort to know how I stand, if the result is to prove every item in the ledger against me. I am interested in my own solvency or insolvency, moral or material, only as regards their practical effects, and those occur automatically without my troubling my head with anticipations, or with manœuvrings for or against them. At the same time I am quite willing to admit an argument in favour of the super-natural instinct of tidiness, since Nature herself is atrociously untidy. Those who possess it may be spirits, finer than the common, who bring unconsciously from some other sphere the desire to mend, in their little piecemeal, the lamentable disorder of things mundane. Then human tidiness may be, in fact, the surest evidence of immortality; and indeed I hope it is. For if I laughed at it in Fifine, I loved its staid pretty manifestations enough to desire with all my soul to find now in their memory some comfort and assurance.
One entire day we devoted to a visit to the Pont-du-Gard, a super-impressive experience, since, owing to the lateness of the season, we had the whole stupendous mise-en-scène, lovely valley and striding aqueduct, to ourselves. We lunched gaily, sitting on the flat rocks of the river, and then climbed the hill, and walked through the huge artery of the bridge, which, drawing from the heart of Usèz, once flushed with life all the ramifying veins of Nîmes. The conduit is dry now, drained of its living force with the decay and death of the ancient city it supplied; but one still thinks of it somehow as a thing animate, a thing actually organic and sentient in the days when the throbbing of its mighty pulses shook the league-long hills by which it travelled.