TAKING ONESELF FOR GRANTED


There are men who are capable of loving a machine more deeply than they
can love a woman. They are among the happiest men on earth. This is not
a sneer meanly shot from cover at women. It is simply a statement of
notorious fact. Men who worry themselves to distraction over the
perfecting of a machine are indubitably blessed beyond their kind. Most
of us have known such men. Yesterday they were constructing motorcars.
But to-day aeroplanes are in the air--or, at any rate, they ought to be,
according to the inventors. Watch the inventors. Invention is not
usually their principal business. They must invent in their spare time.
They must invent before breakfast, invent in the Strand between Lyons's
and the office, invent after dinner, invent on Sundays. See with what
ardour they rush home of a night! See how they seize a half-holiday,
like hungry dogs a bone! They don't want golf, bridge, limericks,
novels, illustrated magazines, clubs, whisky, starting-prices, hints
about neckties, political meetings, yarns, comic songs, anturic salts,
nor the smiles that are situate between a gay corsage and a picture hat.
They never wonder, at a loss, what they will do next. Their evenings
never drag--are always too short. You may, indeed, catch them at twelve
o'clock at night on the flat of their backs; but not in bed! No, in a
shed, under a machine, holding a candle (whose paths drop fatness) up to
the connecting-rod that is strained, or the wheel that is out of centre.
They are continually interested, nay, enthralled. They have a machine,
and they are perfecting it. They get one part right, and then another
goes wrong; and they get that right, and then another goes wrong, and so
on. When they are quite sure they have reached perfection, forth issues
the machine out of the shed--and in five minutes is smashed up, together
with a limb or so of the inventors, just because they had been quite