Leaves in the wind

Front matter

LEAVSS IN THE' WIND

hy

Alpha.

Contents

PAGE

A Fellow Traveller i ix

X CONTENTS

II

I had rather a shock to-day. I was sitting down to write an article on a subject that had still to be found, and had almost reached the point of decision, when a letter which had been addressed to the

Editor of The Star, and which he had sent on to me, started another and more attractive hare. It was a letter announcing my lamented demise. There was no doubt about it. There was the date and there was the name (a nice name too), and there were the circumstances all set out in black and white. And the writer wanted to know, in view of all this, why no obituary notice of me had appeared in the columns of the paper I had adorned.

Now this report, however it arose, is, to use Mark Twain's famous remark in similar circumstances, "greatly exaggerated." I am not dead. I am not half dead. I am not even feeling poorly. I had a tooth out a week or two ago, but otherwise nothing dreadful has happened to me for ever so long. I was once nearly in a shipwreck, but that was so long ago that I had almost forgotten the circumstance. Moreover, as all the people in the ship were saved I could not possibly have died then even if I had been on board. And I wasn't on board, for I had left at the previous port of call. It was a narrow escape, but I can't pretend that I wasn't saved. I was.

But though I am most flagrantly and aggressively alive, the announcement of my death has set me thinking of myself as if I were dead. I find it quite an agreeable diversion. Not that I am morbid. I do not share my friend Clerihew's view, expressed in his chapter on Lord Clive in that noble work "Biography for Beginners." You may remember the chapter. If not, it is short enough to repeat: —

What I like about Clive Is that he is no longer alive.

There's something to be said For being dead.

That is overdoing the thing. What I find agreeable is being alive and thinking I am dead. You have the advantage of both worlds, so to speak. In company w^ith this amiable correspondent, I have shed tears over myself. I have wept at my own graveside. I have composed my own obituary notice, and I don't think I have ever turned out a more moving piece of work. I have met my friends and condoled with them over my decease, and have heard their comments, and I am proud to say that they were quite nice. Some of them made me think that I might write up the obituary notice in a rather higher key, put the virtues of the late lamented ''Alpha of the Plough" in more gaudy colours, tone down the few, the very few, weak points of his austere, saintly, chivalrous, kindly, wise, humorous, generous character — in a word, let myself go a bit more. Old Grumpington at the club, it is true, said that I should be no great loss to the world, and that so far as he was concerned I was one of the people that he could do without. But then Old Grumpington never says a good word for anybody, living or dead. I discounted Grumpington. I took no notice of Grumpington — the beast.

And then I passed from the living world I had left behind to the contemplation of the said Alpha, fallen on sleep, and I found his case no subject for tears. After all, said I, the world is not such a gay place in these days, that I need worry about having quitted it. I have left some dear friends behind, but they will pass the toll-gate too in due course, and join me and those who have preceded me. "What dreams may come!" Well, so be it. I have no fear of the dreams of death, having passed through the dream of life, which was so often like a nightmare. If there are dreams for me, I think they will be better dreams. If there are tasks for me, I think they will be better tasks. If there are no dreams and no tasks, then that also is well. "I see no such horror in a dreamless sleep," said Byron in one of his letters, "and I have no conception of any existence which duration would not make tiresome." And so, dreamless or dreaming, I saw nothing in the circumstances of the departed Alpha to lament. . . .

Meanwhile, I am very well indeed, thank you. If you prick me I shall still bleed. If you tickle me I shall still laugh. And with due encouragement I shall still write.

Ill

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 under-rate 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 plat-

I40 VARIATIONS ON AN OLD THEME

form, 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 Caesar'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 Caesar, 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 anyone 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 Nietzsche'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.