The Magical Chance

by Dallas Lore Sharp

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.

II

But how far run the ways of nature from the devious ways of men! The ways of Mullein Hill from the ways of a military camp! The Great War came and passed and left the earth a vast human grave. But through it all seedtime and harvest came to Mullein Hill, leaving only more and more abundant life. The Great War is an illustration on the grandest scale of what man, departing from the simple ways of nature, will do to man. War is the logic of our present way of living. I am not concerned with war in this book, but with the sources of life and literature. I have a cure for war, however, here on Mullein Hill; and this cure is the very elixir of life and literature.

War could have destroyed, but it did not change, my going or coming here in the hills. My garden went on as it had for years gone on. There was a little more of it, for there was more need in the village; there was a little larger yield of its reasonableness and joy and beans. But I did not plough up my front lawn for potatoes. Years before I had provided myself with a back yard, and got it into tilth for potatoes, keeping the front lawn green for the cow.