Do you know? Perhaps. I am not sure. I am not conscious of any especial interest in Mary Kirkwood until after I came back from London. I had seen her but a few times. We had never talked so long as five consecutive minutes, and then we had talked commonplaces. Not the commonplaces of fashionable people, but the commonplaces of intelligent people. There’s an enormous difference.
The first time my memory records her with the vividness of moving pictures is, of course, at that meeting in my office. The next time is a few days after my return from London. I had been surfeited both in London and on the steamer with the inane amateurs at life, the shallow elegant dabblers in it, interesting themselves only in coaching, bridge, and similar pastimes worthy an asylum for the feeble-minded. I went down to the Kirkwood place with Armitage. As his sister was not in the house we set out for a walk through the grounds to find her. At the outer edge of the gardens a workman told us that if we would follow a path through the swampy woods we could not miss her.
The path was the roughest kind of a trail. Our journey was beset with swarms of insects, most of them mosquitoes in savage humor. It lay along the course of a sluggish narrow stream that looked malarious and undoubtedly was. “Landscape gardening is one of Mary’s fads,” explained her brother. “She has been planning to tackle this swamp for several years. Now she is at it.”
In the depths of the morass we came upon her. She was in man’s clothes—laboring man’s clothes. Her face and neck were protected by veils, her hands by gloves. She was toiling away with a gang of men at clearing the ground where the drains were to center in an artificial lake. Armitage called several times before she heard. Then she dropped her ax and came forward to meet us. There was certainly nothing of what is usually regarded as feminine allure about her. Yet never had I seen a woman more fascinating. There undoubtedly was charm in her face and in her strong, slender figure. But I believe the real charm of charms for me was the spectacle of a woman usefully employed. A woman actually doing something. A woman!
After the greeting she said: “The only way I can get the men to work in this pesthole is by working with them.” She smiled merrily. “One doesn’t look so well as in a fresh tennis suit wielding a racket. But I can’t bear doing things that have no results.”
“My father insisted on bringing us up in the commonest way and with the commonest tastes,” said Armitage, “and Mary has remained even less the lady than I am the gentleman.”
As the mosquitoes were tearing us to pieces Mrs. Kirkwood ordered us back to the house. Before we were out of sight she was leading on her gang and wielding the ax again. At dinner she appeared in all the radiance and grace of the beautiful woman with fondness for and taste in dress. She explained to me her plan—how swamp and sluggish, rotting brook were to be transformed into a wooded park with a swift, clear stream and a succession of cascades. I may add, she carried out the plan, and the results were even beyond what my imagination pictured as she talked.
This first view of her life in the country set me to observing her closely—perhaps more closely and from a different standpoint than a man usually observes a woman. In all she did I saw the same rare and fascinating imagination—the only kind of imagination worth while. Of all its stupidities and follies none so completely convicts the human race of shallowness and bad taste as its notions of what is romantic and idealistic. The more elegant the human animal flatters itself it is, the poorer are its ideals—that is, the further removed from the practical and the useful. So, you rarely find a woman with so much true poetry, true romance, true imagination as to keep house well. But Mary Kirkwood kept house as a truly great artist paints a picture, as a truly great composer creates an opera. In all her house there was not a trace of the crude, costly luxury that rivals the squalor and bareness of poverty in repulsiveness to people of sense and taste. But what comfort! What splendid cooking, what perfection of service. The chairs and sofas, the beds, the linen, the hundred and one small but important devices for facilitating the material side of life, and so putting mind and spirit in the mood for their best— But I despair of making you realize. I should have to catalogue, describe, contrast through page after page. And when I had finished, those who understand what the phrase art of living means would have read only what they already know, while those who do not understand that phrase would be convulsed with the cackling laughter that is the tribute of mush-brain to intellect.
Observing Mary Kirkwood I discovered a great truth about the woman question: the crudest indictment of the intellect of woman is the crude, archaic, futile, and unimaginative way in which is carried on the part of life that is woman’s peculiar work—or, rather, is messed, muddled, slopped, and neglected. No doubt this is not their fault. But it soon will be if they don’t bestir themselves. Already there are American men not a few who apologize for having married as a folly of their green and silly youth.
So, gentle reader, though my enthusiasm tempts me to describe Mary Kirkwood’s housekeeping in detail, I shall spare you. You would not read. You would not understand if you did.