Leaves in the Wind

by A. G. Gardiner

I was going home late last night from one of the Tube stations when my companion pointed to a group—a man in a bowler hat, reading a paper, two women and a child—sitting on a seat on the platform. "There they are," he said. "Every night and any hour, moonlight or moonless, you'll find them sitting there." "What for?" I asked. "Oh, in case there's a raid. They are taking things in time; they are running no risks. You'll see a few at most stations." And as the train passed from station to station I noticed similar little groups on the platforms, sleeping or just staring vacantly at nothing in particular, and waiting till the lights went out and they could wait no longer.

There is no discredit in taking reasonable precautions against danger, but these good people carry apprehension to excess. We need not underrate the risks of the raids, but we need not make ourselves ridiculous about them. So far as the average individual life is concerned they are almost negligible. Assuming that the circumference of danger of an exploding bomb is 90 yards, and that the Germans drop two hundred bombs a month on London, it is, I understand, calculated that it will be thirty-four years before we have all come in the zone of danger. But the Germans do not drop two hundred bombs a month, nor twenty bombs, probably not ten bombs. Let us assume, however, that they get up to an average of twenty bombs. It will be over three hundred years before we have all come within the range of peril. I do not suggest that this reflection justifies us in going out into the streets when a raid is on. It is true I may not get my turn for three hundred years, but still there is no sense in running out to see if my turn has come. So I dive below ground as promptly as anybody. It is foolish to take risks that you need not take. But it is not less foolish to go and sit for hours every night on a Tube station platform, not because there is a raid, but because there may be a raid.

This is carrying the fear of death to extremities. I have referred to Cæsar's sane axiom on the subject, and to his refusal to take what seemed to others reasonable precautions against danger. In the end he was murdered, but in the meantime he had lived as no one whose life is one nervous apprehension of danger can possibly live. You may, of course, carry this philosophy of fearless living to excess. Smalley, in his reminiscences, tells us that when King Edward (then Prince of Wales) was staying at Homburg he said one day to Lord Hartington (the late Duke of Devonshire), "Hartington, you ought not to drink all that champagne." "No, sir, I know I ought not," said Hartington. "Then why do you do it?" "Well, sir, I have made up my mind that I would rather be ill now and then than always taking care of myself." "Oh, you think that now, but when the gout comes what do you think then?" "Sir, if you will ask me then I will tell you. I do not anticipate."

I do not commend Hartington's example for imitation any more than the example of those forlorn little groups on the Tube platforms. He was not refusing, like Cæsar, to be bullied by vague fears; he was, for the sake of a present pleasure, laying up a store of tolerably certain misery. It was not a case of fearless living, but of careless living, which is quite another thing. But at least he got a present pleasure for his recklessness, while the people who hoard up life like misers, and see the shadow of death stalking them all the time, do not live at all. They only exist. They are like Chesterfield in his later years. "I am become a vegetable," he said. "I have been dead twelve years, but I don't want any one to know about it." Those people in the Tube are quite dead, although they don't know about it. What is more, they have never been alive.

You cannot be alive unless you take life gallantly. You know that the Great Harvester is tracking you all the time, and that one day, perhaps quite suddenly, his scythe will catch you and lay you among the sheaves of the past. Every day and every hour he is remorselessly at your heels. A breath of bad air will do his work, or the prick of a pin, or a fall on the stairs, or a draught from the window. You can't take a ride in a bus, or a row in a boat, or a swim in the sea, or a bat at the wicket without offering yourself as a target for the enemy. I have myself seen a batsman receive a mortal blow from a ball driven by his companion at the wicket. Why, those people so forlornly dodging death in the Tube were not out of the danger zone. They were probably in more peril sitting there nursing their fears, lowering their vitality, and incubating death than they would have been going about their reasonable tasks in the fresh air above. You may die from the fear of death. I am not preaching Nietzche's gospel of "Live dangerously." There is no need to try to live dangerously, and no sense in going about tweaking the nose of death to show what a deuce of a fellow you are. The truth is that we cannot help living dangerously. Life is a dangerous calling, full of pitfalls. You, getting the coal in the mine by the light of your lamp, are living with death very, very close at hand. You, on the railway shunting trucks, you in the factory or the engine-shop moving in a maze of machinery, you, in the belly of the ship stoking the fire—all alike are in an adventure that may terminate at any moment. Let us accept the fact like men, and dismiss it like men, going about our tasks as though we had all eternity to live in, not foolishly challenging profitless perils, but, on the other hand, declining to be intimidated by the shadow of the scythe that dogs our steps.

IV

It is, I suppose, a common experience that our self-valuations are not fixed but fluctuating. Sometimes the estimate is extravagantly high; sometimes, but less frequently, it is too low. There are people, no doubt, whose vanity is so vast that no drafts upon it make any appreciable difference to the fund. It is as inexhaustible as the horn of Skrymir. And there are others whose humility is so established that no emotion of vain-glory ever visits them. But the generality of us go up and down according to the weather, our health, our fortune and a hundred trifles good or bad. We are like corks on the wave, sometimes borne buoyantly on the crest of the heaving sea of circumstance, then sinking into the trough of the billows. At this moment I am in the trough. I have been passing through one of those chastening experiences which reveal to us how unimportant we are to the world. When we are in health we bustle about and talk and trade and write and push and thrust and haggle and bargain and feel that we are tremendous fellows. However would the world get on without us? we say. What would become of the office? Who could put those schemes through that I have in hand? What on earth would that dear fellow Robinson do without my judgment to lean on? What would become of Jones if he no longer met me after lunch at the club for a quiet and confidential talk? How would The Star survive without...

And so we inflate ourselves with a comfortable conceit, and feel that we are really the hub of things, and that if anything goes wrong with us there will be a mournful vacuum in society. Then some day the bubble of our vanity is pricked. We are gently laid aside, deflated and humble, the world forgetting, by the world forgot. Our empire has shrunk to the dimensions of a sick-room, and there fever plays its wild dramas, turning the innocent patterns of the wall-paper into fantastic shapes, and fearsome conflicts, filling our unquiet slumbers with dreadful phantoms that, waking, we try to seize, only to fall back defeated and helpless. And then follow the days—those peaceful days—of sheer collapse, when you just lie back on the pillow and look hour by hour at the ceiling, desiring nothing and thinking of nothing, and when the doctor, feeling your stagnant pulse, says, "Yes, you have had a bad shaking."

These are the days of illumination. Outside the buses rumble by, and you know they are crowded with people going down to or returning from the great whirlpool. And you realise that the mighty world is thundering on in the old way as though it had never heard of you. Fleet Street roars by night and day in happy unconcern of you; your absence from "the Gallery" in the afternoon is unnoted by a soul; Robinson gives one thought to you, and then turns to his work as though nothing had happened; Jones misses you after lunch, but is just as happy with Brown; and The Star—well, The Star ... yes, the painful fact has to be faced.... The Star goes on its radiant path as though you had only been a fly on its wheel.

It is a humbling experience. This, then, was all your high-blown pride amounted to. You were just a bubble on the surface, a snowflake on the river—a moment there, then gone for ever. This is the foretaste of death. When that comes the waters will just close over your head as they have closed now—a comment here and there, perhaps friendly, perhaps critical, a few tears it may be, and—oblivion. It is an old story—old as humanity. You remember those verses of Dean Swift on the news of his own death, with what airy jests and indifference it was received in this and that haunt where he had played so great a part. It comes to a card party who affect to receive it in "doleful dumps."