THE
HIGH·HEELE~
SHOES
that stirred the lees around and around, before more immediate mat–
ters, claiming attention, allowed them to settle again.
There was a man
in
the theatre with groping hands. There was
a man on the streetcar with insistent thighs. There was a man who
grinned triumphantly and walked quickly away after he trailed one
down a drizzly street at dusk and finally succeeded
in
his
aim
of
thrusting an unexpected hand under one's raincoat.
I remembered them as I plucked the pansies, took them over
to Margarita's house, came back home, answered the door, received
the amaryllis, the callas, the pinks, and arranged them in the blue
potato glass on top of the buffet. I remembered another man, Mo–
handas Gandhi, probably a stranger to this company, not only be–
cause I had been reading on him of late, but because he seemed
to be the only unimpeachable authority who had ever been called
on to give public advice in this connection. When someone had deli–
cately asked Gandhi, "What is a woman to do when she is attacked
by miscreants?," naming the alternatives of violent self-defense and
immediate flight, he had replied, "For me, there can be no prepara–
tion for violence. All preparation must be for non-violence if courage
of the highest type is to be developed. Violence can only be tolerated
as being preferable always to cowardice. Therefore I would have no
boats ready for flight. . . . " Then he had soared on to the nobler
implications of non-violence, reproaching the world for its cowardice
in arming itself with the atomic bomb.
I understood. When I first read these words, I had said, "Why,
of course," smiling at the unnecessary alarms of some people. But
I had read the words at a rarefied period, fox,-getting Mary, ·forgetting
the high-heeled shoes. I decided now that the inspiration they gave
to
his
probably feminine questioner was small potatoes. Of all the
men suspected of sainthood, Gandhi, measured by
his
own testimony,
should have been able to offer the most concrete comfort here. But
he had evaded the issue. In place of the tangible example, vague
words. Gandhi, in face of the ubiquitous womanly fear, was a failure.
All he had really said was: don't even think about it. Then (I
guessed), holding up his strong, bony brown hand, he had shaken
his white-fuzzed, compactly-shaped head slowly back and forth and
declined to hear the ifs and buts. The rest, as they say, was silence.
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