THE PLEASURES OF IGNORANCE
BY ROBERT LYND
LONDON
GRANT RICHARDS LTD.
ST MARTIN'S STREET
1921
PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN BY THE RIVERSIDE PRESS LIMITED
EDINBURGH
TO JAMES WINDER GOOD
CHAPTER PAGE
I. THE PLEASURES OF IGNORANCE 11
II. THE HERRING FLEET 19
III. THE BETTING MAN 29
IV. THE HUM OF INSECTS 40
V. CATS 51
VI. MAY 61
VII. NEW YEAR PROPHECIES 70
VIII. ON KNOWING THE DIFFERENCE 82
IX. THE INTELLECTUAL SIDE OF HORSE-RACING 91
X. WHY WE HATE INSECTS 102
XI. VIRTUE 114
XII. JUNE 123
XIII. ON FEELING GAY 132
XIV. IN THE TRAIN 141
XV. THE MOST CURIOUS ANIMAL 149
XVI. THE OLD INDIFFERENCE 158
XVII. EGGS: AN EASTER HOMILY 167
XVIII. ENTER THE SPRING 176
XIX. THE DAREDEVIL BARBER 186
XX. WEEDS: AN APPRECIATION 195
XXI. A JUROR IN WAITING 205
XXII. THE THREE-HALFPENNY BIT 215
XXIII. THE MORALS OF BEANS 224
XXIV. ON SEEING A JOKE 233
XXV. GOING TO THE DERBY 243
XXVI. THIS BLASTED WORLD 253
_Acknowledgments are due to "The New Statesman," in which all but one
of these essays appeared. "Going to the Derby" appeared in "The Daily
News."--R.L._
I
THE PLEASURES OF IGNORANCE
It is impossible to take a walk in the country with an average
townsman--especially, perhaps, in April or May--without being amazed
at the vast continent of his ignorance. It is impossible to take a
walk in the country oneself without being amazed at the vast continent
of one's own ignorance. Thousands of men and women live and die
without knowing the difference between a beech and an elm, between the
song of a thrush and the song of a blackbird. Probably in a modern
city the man who can distinguish between a thrush's and a blackbird's
song is the exception. It is not that we have not seen the birds. It
is simply that we have not noticed them. We have been surrounded by
birds all our lives, yet so feeble is our observation that many of us
could not tell whether or not the chaffinch sings, or the colour of
the cuckoo. We argue like small boys as to whether the cuckoo always
sings as he flies or sometimes in the branches of a tree--whether
Chapman drew on his fancy or his knowledge of nature in the lines:
When in the oak's green arms the cuckoo sings,
And first delights men in the lovely springs.
This ignorance, however, is not altogether miserable. Out of it we get
the constant pleasure of discovery. Every fact of nature comes to us
each spring, if only we are sufficiently ignorant, with the dew still
on it. If we have lived half a lifetime without having ever even seen
a cuckoo, and know it only as a wandering voice, we are all the more
delighted at the spectacle of its runaway flight as it hurries from
wood to wood conscious of its crimes, and at the way in which it halts
hawk-like in the wind, its long tail quivering, before it dares
descend on a hill-side of fir-trees where avenging presences may lurk.
It would be absurd to pretend that the naturalist does not also find
pleasure in observing the life of the birds, but his is a steady
pleasure, almost a sober and plodding occupation, compared to the
morning enthusiasm of the man who sees a cuckoo for the first time,
and, behold, the world is made new.
And, as to that, the happiness even of the naturalist depends in some
measure upon his ignorance, which still leaves him new worlds of this
kind to conquer. He may have reached the very Z of knowledge in the
books, but he still feels half ignorant until he has confirmed each
bright particular with his eyes. He wishes with his own eyes to see
the female cuckoo--rare spectacle!--as she lays her egg on the ground
and takes it in her bill to the nest in which it is destined to breed
infanticide. He would sit day after day with a field-glass against his
eyes in order personally to endorse or refute the evidence suggesting
that the cuckoo _does_ lay on the ground and not in a nest. And, if he
is so far fortunate as to discover this most secretive of birds in the
very act of laying, there still remain for him other fields to conquer
in a multitude of such disputed questions as whether the cuckoo's egg
is always of the same colour as the other eggs in the nest in which
she abandons it. Assuredly the men of science have no reason as yet to
weep over their lost ignorance. If they seem to know everything, it is
only because you and I know almost nothing. There will always be a
fortune of ignorance waiting for them under every fact they turn up.
They will never know what song the Sirens sang to Ulysses any more
than Sir Thomas Browne did.
If I have called in the cuckoo to illustrate the ordinary man's
ignorance, it is not because I can speak with authority on that bird.
It is simply because, passing the spring in a parish that seemed to
have been invaded by all the cuckoos of Africa, I realised how
exceedingly little I, or anybody else I met, knew about them. But your
and my ignorance is not confined to cuckoos. It dabbles in all created
things, from the sun and moon down to the names of the flowers. I once
heard a clever lady asking whether the new moon always appears on the
same day of the week. She added that perhaps it is better not to know,
because, if one does not know when or in what part of the sky to
expect it, its appearance is always a pleasant surprise. I fancy,
however, the new moon always comes as a surprise even to those who are
familiar with her time-tables. And it is the same with the coming in
of spring and the waves of the flowers. We are not the less delighted
to find an early primrose because we are sufficiently learned in the
services of the year to look for it in March or April rather than in
October. We know, again, that the blossom precedes and not succeeds
the fruit of the apple-tree, but this does not lessen our amazement at
the beautiful holiday of a May orchard.
At the same time there is, perhaps, a special pleasure in re-learning
the names of many of the flowers every spring. It is like re-reading a
book that one has almost forgotten. Montaigne tells us that he had so
bad a memory that he could always read an old book as though he had
never read it before. I have myself a capricious and leaking memory. I
can read _Hamlet_ itself and _The Pickwick Papers_ as though they were
the work of new authors and had come wet from the press, so much of
them fades between one reading and another. There are occasions on
which a memory of this kind is an affliction, especially if one has a
passion for accuracy. But this is only when life has an object beyond
entertainment. In respect of mere luxury, it may be doubted whether
there is not as much to be said for a bad memory as for a good one.
With a bad memory one can go on reading Plutarch and _The Arabian
Nights_ all one's life. Little shreds and tags, it is probable, will
stick even in the worst memory, just as a succession of sheep cannot
leap through a gap in a hedge without leaving a few wisps of wool on
the thorns. But the sheep themselves escape, and the great authors
leap in the same way out of an idle memory and leave little enough
behind.
And, if we can forget books, it is as easy to forget the months and
what they showed us, when once they are gone. Just for the moment I
tell myself that I know May like the multiplication table and could
pass an examination on its flowers, their appearance and their order.
To-day I can affirm confidently that the buttercup has five petals.
(Or is it six? I knew for certain last week.) But next year I shall
probably have forgotten my arithmetic, and may have to learn once more
not to confuse the buttercup with the celandine. Once more I shall see
the world as a garden through the eyes of a stranger, my breath taken
away with surprise by the painted fields. I shall find myself
wondering whether it is science or ignorance which affirms that the
swift (that black exaggeration of the swallow and yet a kinsman of the
humming-bird) never settles even on a nest, but disappears at night
into the heights of the air. I shall learn with fresh astonishment
that it is the male, and not the female, cuckoo that sings. I may have
to learn again not to call the campion a wild geranium, and to
rediscover whether the ash comes early or late in the etiquette of the
trees. A contemporary English novelist was once asked by a foreigner
what was the most important crop in England. He answered without a
moment's hesitation: "Rye." Ignorance so complete as this seems to me
to be touched with magnificence; but the ignorance even of illiterate
persons is enormous. The average man who uses a telephone could not
explain how a telephone works. He takes for granted the telephone, the
railway train, the linotype, the aeroplane, as our grandfathers took
for granted the miracles of the gospels. He neither questions nor
understands them. It is as though each of us investigated and made his
own only a tiny circle of facts. Knowledge outside the day's work is
regarded by most men as a gewgaw. Still we are constantly in reaction
against our ignorance. We rouse ourselves at intervals and speculate.
We revel in speculations about anything at all--about life after death
or about such questions as that which is said to have puzzled
Aristotle, "why sneezing from noon to midnight was good, but from
night to noon unlucky." One of the greatest joys known to man is to
take such a flight into ignorance in search of knowledge. The great
pleasure of ignorance is, after all, the pleasure of asking questions.
The man who has lost this pleasure or exchanged it for the pleasure of
dogma, which is the pleasure of answering, is already beginning to
stiffen. One envies so inquisitive a man as Jowett, who sat down to
the study of physiology in his sixties. Most of us have lost the sense
of our ignorance long before that age. We even become vain of our
squirrel's hoard of knowledge and regard increasing age itself as a
school of omniscience. We forget that Socrates was famed for wisdom
not because he was omniscient but because he realised at the age of
seventy that he still knew nothing.
II
THE HERRING FLEET
The last spectacle of which Christian men are likely to grow tired is
a harbour. Centuries hence there may be jumping-off places for the
stars, and our children's children's and so forth children may regard
a ship as a creeping thing scarcely more adventurous than a worm.
Meanwhile, every harbour gives us a sense of being in touch, if not
with the ends of the universe, with the ends of the earth. This, more
than the entrance to a wood or the source of a river or the top of a
bald hill, is the beginning of infinity. Even the dirtiest coal-boat
that lies beached in the harbour, a mere hulk of utilities that are
taken away by dirty men in dirty carts, will in a day or two lift
itself from the mud on a full tide and float away like a spirit into
the sunset or curtsy to the image of the North Star. Mystery lies over
the sea. Every ship is bound for Thule. That, perhaps, is why men are
content day after day to stand on the pier-head and to gaze at the
water and the ships and sailors running up and down the decks and
pulling the ropes of sails.
We may have no reason for pretending to ourselves that the
fishing-boats are ships of dreams setting out on infinite voyages.
But, none the less, even in a fishing village there is always a
congregation of watching men and women on the pier. Every day the
crowd collects to see the harbour awake into life with the bustle of
men about to set out among the nations of the fishes. By day the boats
lie side by side in the harbour--stand side by side, rather, like
horses in a stable. There are two rows of them, making a camp of masts
on the shallow water. In other parts of the harbour white gigs are
bottomed on the sand in companies of two and three. As the tide slowly
rises, the masts which have been lying over on one side in a sleepy
stillness begin to stir, then to sway, until with each new impulse of
the sea all the boats are dancing, and soon the whole harbour is awake
and merry as if every mast were a steeple with a peal of bells. It is
not long till the fishermen arrive. One meets them in every cobbled
lane. How magnificent the noise made by a man in sea-boots on the
stones! Surely, he strikes sparks from the road. He thumps the ground
as with a hammer. The earth rings. One has seen those boots in the
morning hanging outside the door of his house while he slept. They
have been oiled, and left there to dry. They have kept the shape of
his limb and the crook of his knee in an uncanny way. They look as
though he had taken off his legs before going into the house and hung
them on the wall. But the fisherman is a hero not only in his boots.
His sea-coat is no less magnificent. This may be of oil-skin yellow or
of maroon or of stained white or of blue, with a blue jersey showing
under it, and, perhaps, a red woollen muffler or a scarf with green
spots on a red ground round his throat. He has not learned to be timid
of colour. Even out of the mouths of his boots you may see the ends of
red knitted leggings protruding. His yellow or black sou'-wester
roofing the back of his neck, he comes down to harbour, as splendid as
a figure at a fair. And always, when he arrives, he is smoking a pipe.
As one watches him, one wonders if anybody except a fisherman, as he
looks out over the harbour, knows how to smoke. He has made tobacco
part of himself, like breathing.
If the tide is already full the fishermen are taken off in small
rowing-boats, most of them standing, and the place is busy with a
criss-cross of travelling crews till the fishing-boats are all manned.
If the water is not yet deep, however, most of the men walk to their
boats, lumbering through the waves, and occasionally jumping like a
wading girl as a larger wave threatens the tops of their boots. Many
of them carry their supper in a basket or a handkerchief. The first of
the boats begins to move out of its stall. It is tugged into the clear
water, and the fishermen put out long oars and row it laboriously to
the mouth of the harbour and the wind. It is followed by a motor-boat,
and another, and another. There are forty putting up their sails like
one. The harbour moves. One has a sense as of things liberated. It is
as though a flock of birds were being loosed into the air--as though
pigeon after pigeon were being set free out of a basket for home.
Lug-sail after lugsail, brown as the underside of a mushroom, hurries
out among the waves. A green little tub of a steamboat follows with
insolent smoke. The motor-boats hasten out like scenting dogs. Every
sort of craft--motor-boat, gig, lugger and steamboat--makes for sea,
higgledy-piggledy in a long line, an irregular procession of black and
blue and green and white and brown. Here, as in the men's clothes, the
paint-pots have been spilled.
There is nothing more sociable than a fishing-fleet. The boats
overtake each other, like horses in a race. They gallop in rivalry.
But for the most part they keep together, and move like a travelling
town over the sea. As likely as not they will have to come back out of
the storm into the shelter of the bay, and they will ride there till
nightfall, when every boat becomes a lamp and every sail a shadow. In
the darkness they hang like a constellation on the oily water. They
become a company of dancing stars. Every now and then a boat moves off
on a quest of its own. It is as though the firmament were shaken. One
hears the kick-kick-kick of the motor, and a star has become a
will-o'-the-wisp. These lights can no more keep still than a
playground of children. They always make a pattern on the water, but
they never make the same pattern. Sometimes they lengthen themselves
against the sandy shore on the far side of the bay into a golden
river. Sometimes they huddle together into a little procession of
monks carrying tapers....
One goes down to the harbour after breakfast the next morning to see
what has been the result of the night's fishing. One does not really
need to go down. One can see it afar off. There is movement as at the
building of a city. On every boat men are busy emptying the nets,
disentangling the fish that have been caught by the gills, tumbling
them in a liquid mass into the bottom of the boat. One can hardly see
the fish separately. They flow into one another. They are a pool of
quick-silver. One is amazed, as the disciples must have been amazed at
the miraculous draught. Everything is covered with their scales. The
fishermen are spotted as if with confetti. Their hands, their brown
coats, their boots are a mass of white-and-blue spots. The labourers
with the gurries--great blue boxes that are carried like Sedan-chairs
between two pairs of handles--come up alongside, and the fish are
ladled into the gurries from tin pans. As each gurry is filled the men
hasten off with it to where the auctioneer is standing. With the help
of a small notebook and a lead pencil he auctions it before an
outsider can wink, and the gurry is taken a few yards further, where
women are pouring herrings into barrels. They, too, are covered with
fish-scales from head to foot. They are dabbled like a painter's
palette. So great is the haul that every cart in the country-side has
come down to lend a hand. The fish are poured into the carts over the
sides of the boats like water. Old fishermen stand aside and look on
with a sense of having wasted their youth. They recall the time when
they went fishing in the North Sea and had to be content to sell their
catch at a shilling and sixpence a cran--a cran being equal to four
gurries, or about a thousand herrings. Who is there now who would sell
even a hundred herrings for one and sixpence? Who is there who would
sell a hundred herrings for ten and sixpence? Yet one gig alone this
morning has brought in fourteen thousand herrings. No wonder that
there is an atmosphere of excitement in the harbour. No wonder that
the carts almost run over you as they make journey after journey
between boat and barrel. No wonder that three different sorts of
sea-gulls--the herring gull, the lesser black-headed gull, and the
black-backed gull--have gathered about us in screaming multitudes and
fill the air like a snowstorm. Every child in the town seems to be
making for home with its finger in a fish's mouth, or in two fishes'
mouths, or in three fishes' mouths. Artists have hurried down to the
harbour, and have set up their easels on every spot that is not
already occupied by a fish barrel or an auctioneer or a man with a
knife in his teeth preparing to gut a dogfish. The town has lost its
head. It has become Midas for the day. Every time it opens its mouth a
herring comes out. A doom of herrings has come upon us. The smell
rises to heaven. It is as though we were breathing fish-scales. Even
the pretty blue overalls of the children have become spotted.
Everywhere barrels and boxes have been piled high. We are hoisting
them on to carts--farm carts, grocers' carts, coal carts, any sort of
carts. We must get rid of the stuff at all costs. Anything to get it
up the hill to the railway station. The very horses are frenzied. They
stick their toes into the hill and groan. The drivers, excited with
cupidity as they think of all the journeys they will be able to make
before evening, bully them and beat them with the end of the reins.
Their eyes are excited, their gestures impatient. They fill the town
with clamour and smell. It is an occasion on which, as the vulgar say,
they wouldn't call the Queen their aunt....
This, I fancy, is where all the romance of the sea began--in the story
of a greedy man and a fresh herring. The ship was a symbol of man's
questing stomach long before it was a symbol of his questing soul. He
was a hungry man, not a poet, when he built the first harbour.
Luckily, the harbour made a poet of him. Sails gave him wings. He
learned to traffic for wonders. He became a traveller. He told tales.
He discovered the illusion of horizons. Perhaps, however, it is less
the sailor than the ship that attracts our imagination. The ship seems
to convey to us more than anything else a sense at once of perfect
freedom and perfect adventure.
That is why we are content to stand on the harbour stones all day and
watch anything with sails. We ourselves want to live in some such
freedom and adventure as this. We are feeding our appetite for liberty
as we gaze hungrily after the ships making their way out of harbour
into the sea.
III
THE BETTING MAN
If The Panther wins the Derby,[He didn't] as most people apparently
expect him to do, his victory will carry more weight among frequenters
of race-courses as an argument for Socialism than any that has yet
been invented. For The Panther is a Government-bred horse, born and
brought up in defiance of the _laissez-faire_ principles of Mr Harold
Cox. He will therefore carry the colours of a great principle at Epsom
as well as those of his present lessee. Who would have thought five
years ago that the Derby favourite of 1919 would start under so grave
a responsibility?
Not that racing men have much time to spare for thoughts about social
problems, even when these are related to a horse. Theirs is a busy
life. They enjoy little of the leisure that falls to the lot of
statesmen and haberdashers.
Their anxieties are a serial story continued from one edition of the
day's papers to another Nor does the last edition of the evening paper
make an end of their anxieties. It is not an epilogue to one day so
much as a prologue to the next. The programme of races for the
following day suggests more problems than the Peace Conference itself
could settle in a month. The racing man, having studied the names of
the horses entered, goes out to buy some tobacco. As he takes his
change from the tobacconist, he asks: "Have you heard anything for
to-morrow?" The tobacconist says: "I heard Green Cloak for the first
race," The racing man nods. "You didn't hear anything for the big
race?" he asks. "No. Somebody was saying Holy Saint." "I heard Oily
Hair," says the racing man gravely. "Good-night." And he goes out. His
brow becomes knitted with thought as he moves off along the pavement.
He tells himself that Holy Saint certainly does offer difficulties.
Holy Saint is a notoriously bad starter. If he could be trusted to get
away, he would be one of the finest horses of his year in
long-distance races. But he is continually being left at the post. To
back him would be pure gambling. He could win if he liked, but would
he like? On the whole, Oily Hair is a safer horse to back. He has
already beaten Holy Saint in the Chiswick Cup, and only lost the
Scotch Plate to Disaster by a neck. As the racing man allows his
memory to dwell on the achievements of Oily Hair his confidence rises.
"I see nothing to beat him," he says to himself. He has just decided
to put "a fiver" on him when he meets an acquaintance, who suggests a
drink. As they drink, the talk turns on horses. "What are you backing
in the big race to-morrow?" "Have you heard anything?" "I heard Oily
Hair." "I think not. I'll tell you why. Tommy Fitzgibbon's youngest
sister is at school with two sisters of Willie Soames, who's going to
ride Peace on Earth to-morrow, and one of them told her that Willie
had written to her to put every halfpenny she has on Peace on Earth."
"I'm sick, sore and tired of backing Peace on Earth. He's a
cantankerous beast that seems to take a positive pleasure in losing
races." "Well, remember what I told you...."
On arriving home our sportsman goes to his shelves and takes down the
last annual volume of _M'Call's Racing Chronicle and Pocket Turf
Calendar_, and looks up Peace on Earth in the index. He turns up the
record of one race after another, and finds that the horse has a
better past than he had remembered. He cannot make up his mind what to
do. He looks over several weekly papers to see if any of them can
throw light on his difficulties. Each of them names a different winner
for the big race. When he puts on his pyjamas that night, all he knows
is that he has decided to decide nothing till the next day.
Next day he once more reads the names of the horses entered for the
various races, and glances down the list of winners selected by the
racing prophet in the morning paper. Having breakfasted late, he finds
he has only about an hour to waste before catching a train for the
races, and he resolves to pay a call at the "Bird of Paradise," where
a friend of his who has an unusual gift for picking up information is
usually to be found about noon. He learns from the landlord that his
friend has been in and gone away, but the landlord tells him that he
hears Pudding is a certainty.
"Have you any reason for thinking so?"
"Well, there was a man in here who has a son a policeman close by
Jobson's stables, and he tells me that everybody in the neighbourhood
has been backing Pudding down to their last spoon. That looks as if
word had been passed round that it was going to win." The racing man
passes out and looks in at the "Pink Elephant" to see if his friend is
there. He is seated at a little table in an upstairs parlour with four
others, all drinking whisky and exchanging tips. They belong to the
most credulous race of men alive. They are all believers in what is
called information, and information is simply the betting man's name
for gossip. The friend is speaking in a low but excited voice to his
companions, who crouch over towards him in order to catch information
not meant for the rest of the room. He tells how he had just been in
to buy a paper at his newsagent's, and how his newsagent had been
calling on his solicitor that morning, and the solicitor told him that
the caller who had just left as he came in was Gordon, the owner of
Cutandrun, and Gordon said that Cutandrun was the biggest thing that
had ever come into his hands. The buzz-buzz of talk in the
smoke-filled room and the clatter of passing carts makes it difficult
to hear him, but the others lean over the table with red, intent
faces, like men among whom an apostle has come. They do not stay long
over their drinks, as they have not much time for social pleasures.
They swallow their whisky with a quick gesture look at their watches,
stand up hurriedly and part with handshakes.
Then comes a drive to the railway station where race-cards are being
sold. The racing-man buys a "card" and several papers. He looks down
the lists of the horses again in the train, and tries to make up his
mind whether to take the tobacconist's tip and back Green Cloak for
the first race. He believes greatly in breeding, and by far the
best-bred horse in the race is Liberal, who has three Derby winners in
his pedigree. Then there is Red Rose, who created a sensation a month
ago by winning two races in a day. He decides to do nothing till he
sees the horses themselves. He pays thirty shillings at the turnstile
of the race-course and is admitted to the grand stand. Already one or
two bookmakers are shouting from their stands, and some of them have
chalked up on blackboards the odds they are willing to give in the big
race. He looks at the board and sees that he can get twenties against
Cutandrun. A five-pound note might bring him a hundred pounds. On the
other hand, if Oily Hair was going to win, he wouldn't like to miss
it. The bookmakers are offering fives against it. Holy Saint is hot
favourite at two to one. That alone makes him impatient of it, for he
dislikes backing favourites. He prefers the big risks, with great
scoops if he wins. However, he will make up his mind later. Meanwhile,
he will go to the paddock and have a look at the horses for the first
race. Half-a-dozen horses are already out, and men with numbers on
their arms are walking them round and round in a ring. He consults his
card and sees that No. 7 is Brighton Beauty, and No. 2 (a slender,
glossy, black beast with a white star in his forehead) Green Cloak.
Liberal has not appeared. The numbers of the starters, with the names
of the jockeys, are now being hoisted. He makes a pencil-mark opposite
the name of each starter on his racing-card, and jots down the name of
the jockey. Raff, he sees, is riding Green Cloak. That is in its
favour.
When he gets back to the betting-ring, the bookmakers are shouting
hoarsely against each other. Liberal is a very hot favourite. They are
shouting: "I'll take two to one. I'll take two to one. Five to one bar
one. A hundred to eight Green Cloak." He feels almost sure Liberal
will win, but Green Cloak--he wishes he had asked the tobacconist
where he got his information from. Anyhow, half-a-sovereign doesn't
matter much. He goes up to a bookmaker, and says: "Ten shillings Green
Cloak." The bookmaker turns to his clerk and says: "Six pound five to
ten shillings Green Cloak," gives a red-white-and-blue card with his
name and a number on it; the other takes the card, writes on the back
of it the name of the horse and the amount of the bet, and makes for
the stand to see the race. The horses have now come out, and are off
one after another to the starting-post. Green Cloak would be hard to
miss because of his jockey's colours--old gold, scarlet sleeves, and
green and black quartered cap. The bell has hardly rung to announce
that the race has begun when men in the crowd begin to dogmatise about
the result. One man keeps saying: "Green Cloak wins this race. Green
Cloak wins this race." Another says: "Liberal leads." Another says:
"No; that's Jumping Frog." To the unaccustomed eye the horses seem as
close to each other as a swarm of bees. Suddenly, however, a bay horse
springs forward and seems to put a length between itself and the
others at every stride. The people in the stand shout: "Liberal!
Liberal!" It wins by about ten lengths. Green Cloak is second, but a
bad second. The crowd begins to pour down from the stand again. Those
who have won wait near the bookmakers till the winner has been to the
unsaddling enclosure and the announcement "All right" is made. Then
the bookmakers begin to pay out, and the crowd moves off to the
paddock again to see the horses for the next race.
Friends stop each other and exchange information in low voices. Others
do their best to listen in the hope of overhearing information: "I
hear Tomsk," "Johnnie says lay your last penny on Glasgow Pet," "I'm
going to back Submarine." And the parade of the horses, the hoisting
of the names of the starters and jockeys, the laying of the bets, and
the climbing of the grand stand are all gone through over and over
again. The betting man has no time even for a drink. To the casual
onlooker a day's horse-racing has the appearance of a day's holiday.
But the racing man knows better. He is collecting information, coming
to decisions, wandering among the bookies in the hope of getting a
good price, climbing into the grand stand and descending from it,
studying the points of the horses all the time with as little chance
of leisure as though he were a stockbroker during a financial crisis
or a sailor on a sinking ship.
Perhaps, in the train on the way home from the races, he may relax a
little. Certainly, if he has backed Cutandrun, he will. For Cutandrun
won at ten to one, and his pocket is full of five-pound notes. He
feels quite jocular now that the strain is over. He makes puns on the
names of the defeated horses. "Lie Low lay low all right," he
announces to the compartment, indifferent to the scowls of the man in
the corner who had backed it. "Hopscotch didn't hop quite fast
enough." Were he tipsy, he could not jest more fluently. His jokes are
small, but be not too severe on him. The man has had a hard day. Wait
but an hour, and care will descend on him again. He will not have sat
down to dinner in his hotel for three minutes till someone will be
saying to him: "Have you heard anything for the Cup to-morrow?" There
is no six-hours day for the betting man. He is the drudge of chance
for every waking hour. He is enviable only for one thing. He knows
what to talk about to barbers.
IV
THE HUM OF INSECTS
It makes all the difference whether you hear an insect in the bedroom
or in the garden. In the garden the voice of the insect soothes; in
the bedroom it irritates. In the garden it is the hum of spring; in
the bedroom it seems to belong to the same school of music as the bizz
of the dentist's drill or the saw-mill. It may be that it is not the
right sort of insect that invades the bedroom. Even in the garden we
wave away a mosquito. Either its note is in itself offensive or we
dislike it as the voice of an unscrupulous enemy. By an unscrupulous
enemy I mean an enemy that attacks without waiting to be attacked. The
mosquito is a beast of prey; it is out for blood, whether one is as
gentle as Tom Pinch or uses violence. The bee and the wasp are in
comparison noble creatures. They will, so it is said, never injure a
human being unless a human being has injured them. The worst of it is
they do not discriminate between one human being and another, and the
bee that floats over the wall into our garden may turn out to have
been exasperated by the behaviour of a retired policeman five miles
away who struck at it with a spade and roused in it a blind passion
for reprisals. That or something like it is, probably, the explanation
of the stings perfectly innocent persons receive from an insect that
is said never to touch you if you leave it alone. As a matter of fact,
when a bee loses its head, it does not even wait for a human being in
order to relieve its feelings, I have seen a dog racing round a field
in terror as a result of a sting from an angry bee. I have seen a
turkey racing round a farmyard in terror as a result of the same
thing. All the trouble arose from a human being's having very properly
removed a large quantity of honey from a row of hives. I do not admit
that the bee would have been justified in stinging even the human
being--who, after all, is master on this partially civilised planet.
It had certainly no right to sting the dog or the turkey, which had as
little to do with stealing the honey as the Vice-Chancellor of Oxford
University. Yet in spite of such things, and of the fact that some
breeds of bees are notorious for their crossness, especially when
there is thunder in the air, the bee is morally far higher in the
scale than the mosquito. Not only does it give you honey instead of
malaria, and help your apples and strawberries to multiply, but it
aims at living a quiet, inoffensive life, at peace with everybody,
except when it is annoyed. The mosquito does what it does in cold
blood. That is why it is so unwelcome a bedroom visitor.
But even a bee or a wasp, I fancy, would seem tedious company at two
in the morning, especially if it came and buzzed near the pillow. It
is not so much that you would be frightened: if the wasp alighted on
your cheek, you could always lie still and hold your breath till it
had finished trying to sting--that is an infallible preventive. But
there is a limit to the amount of your night's rest that you are
willing to sacrifice in this way. You cannot hold your breath while
you are asleep, and yet you dare not cease holding your breath while a
wasp is walking over your face. Besides, it might crawl into your ear,
and what would you do then? Luckily, the question does not often arise
in practice owing to the fact that the wasp and the bee are more like
human beings than mosquitoes and have more or less the same habits of
nocturnal rest. As we sit in the garden, however, the mind is bound to
speculate, and to revolve such questions as whether this hum of
insects that delights us is in itself delightful, whether its
delightfulness depends on its surroundings, or whether it depends on
its associations with past springs.
Certainly in a garden the noise of insects seems as essentially
beautiful a thing as the noise of birds or the noise of the sea. Even
these have been criticised, especially by persons who suffer from
sleeplessness, but their beauty is affirmed by the general voice of
mankind. These three noises appear to have an infinite capacity for
giving us pleasure--a capacity, probably, beyond that of any music of
instruments. It may be that on hearing them we become a part of some
universal music, and that the rhythm of wave, bird and insect echoes
in some way the rhythm of our own breath and blood. Man is in love
with life and these are the millionfold chorus of life--the magnified
echo of his own pleasure in being alive. At the same time, our
pleasure in the hum of insects is also, I think, a pleasure of
reminiscence. It reminds us of other springs and summers in other
gardens. It reminds us of the infinite peace of childhood when on a
fine day the world hardly existed beyond the garden-gate. We can smell
moss-roses--how we loved them as children!--as a bee swings by. Insect
after insect dances through the air, each dying away like a note of
music, and we see again the border of pinks and the strawberries, and
the garden paths edged with box, and the old dilapidated wooden seat
under the tree, and an apple-tree in the long grass, and a stream
beyond the apple-tree, and all those things that made us infinitely
happy as children when we were in the country--happier than we were
ever made by toys, for we do not remember any toys so intensely as we
remember the garden and the farm. We had the illusion in those days
that it was going to last for ever. There was no past or future. There
was nothing real except the present in which we lived--a present in
which all the human beings were kind, in which a dim-sighted
grandfather sang songs (especially a song in which the chorus began
"Free and easy"), in which aunts brought us animal biscuits out of
town, in which there was neither man-servant nor maid-servant, neither
ox nor ass, that did not seem to go about with a bright face. It was a
present that overflowed with kindness, though everybody except the ox
and the ass believed that it was only by the skin of our teeth that
any of us would escape being burnt alive for eternity. Perhaps we
thought little enough about it except on Sundays or at prayers.
Certainly no one was gloomy about it before children. William John
McNabb, the huge labourer who looked after the horses, greeted us all
as cheerfully as if we had been saved and ready for paradise.
It would be unfair to human beings, however, to suggest that they are
less lavish with their smiles than they were thirty years or so ago.
Everybody--or almost everybody--still smiles. We can hardly stop to
talk to a man in the street without a duet of smiles. The Prince of
Wales smiles across the world from left to right, and the Crown Prince
of Japan smiles across the world from right to left. We cannot open an
illustrated paper without seeing smiling statesmen, cricketers,
jockeys, oarsmen, bridegrooms, clergymen, actresses and
undergraduates. Yet somehow we are no longer made happy by a smile. We
no longer take it, as we used to take it, as evidence that the person
smiling is either happy or kind. It then seemed to come from the
heart. It now seems a formula. It is, we may admit, a pleasant and
useful formula. But a man might easily be a burglar or a murderer or a
Cabinet Minister and smile. Some people are supposed to smile merely
in order to show what good teeth they have. William John McNabb, I am
sure, never did that.
We need not grumble at our contemporaries, however, for not being so
fine as William John McNabb. To children, for all we know, the world
may still seem to be full of people who laugh because they are happy
and smile because they are kind. The world will always remain to a
child the chief of toys, and the hum of insects as enchanting as the
hum of a musical top. Even those of us who are grown up can recover
this enchantment, not only through the pleasures of memory but through
the endless pleasures of watching the things that inhabit the earth.
The world is always waiting to be discovered in full, and yet no life
is long enough to discover the whole of a single county, or even the
whole of a single parish. Who alive, for instance, knows all the moles
of Sussex? I confess I got my first sight of one a few days ago, and,
though I had seen dead moles hanging from trees and had read
descriptions of moles, the living creature was as unexpected as if one
had come on it silent upon a peak in Darien. I had never expected it
to look so black and glossy in the midday sun or to have that little
pink snout that made me think of it as a small underground pig. I had
always been told, too, that the sound of a footstep would frighten a
mole, but this mole only began to show fright at the sound of voices.
Then it began to tear its way into the undergrowth with paws and snout
ever trying to overtake each other. Mr Blunden has described how
The lost mole tries to pierce the mattocked clay
In agony and terror of the sun.
I got much the same impression of agony and terror as this poor
creature dug its way into the grass and ferns and, coming out at the
far end of the clump, bolted under a tree like a frightened pig. And
yet, they say, this poor little coward is a fierce animal enough. He
is, we are told, impelled by so cruel a hunger that he would die of it
were it to go unsatisfied for even twenty-four hours. If he can find
nothing else to eat, he will kill and eat a fellow-mole. So the
authorities tell us, but I wonder how many of the authorities have
even seen a mole in the very act of cannibalism. How many of them have
followed him on his long journeys through the bowels of the earth? He
certainly looked no South Sea monster on the Sunday morning on which
for a few seconds I watched him. Nor would John Clare have written
affectionately about him had he been entirely bloody-minded.
Then there was the hedgehog. The charm of hedgehogs is that we do not
see them every day--that their appearance is a secret and an accident.
They are a part of the busy life that goes on all about us as
mysteriously as the movements of spirits. Consequently, when I was
looking over a sloping field the other evening and, hearing a
crackling as of sticks being trodden on, turned my eyes and saw a
living creature making its way out of a wood into the grass, I was
delighted to find that it was a hedgehog and not a man or a rat. I
could see it only dimly in the twilight, and it was difficult to
believe that so small an animal had made so great a noise. The
pleasure of recognition, unfortunately, was not mutual. No sooner did
the hedgehog hear a foot pressing on the road than it gave up all
thoughts of its supper of insects and hobbled back into the thicket. I
regretted only that I had not made a greater noise, and scared it into
rolling itself into a ball, as everybody says it does when alarmed.
But it is perhaps just as well that the hedgehog did not merely repeat
itself in this way. We like a certain variety of behaviour in
animals--some element of the unexpected that always keeps our
curiosity alive and looking forward.
But we must not exaggerate the pleasure to be got from moles and
hedgehogs. They make a part of our being happy, but they do not
delight the whole of our being, as a child is delighted by the world
every spring. It is probably the child in us that responds most
wholeheartedly to such pleasures. They, like the hum of insects, help
to restore the illusion of a world that is perfectly happy because it
is such a Noah's Ark of a spectacle and everybody is kind. But, even
as we submit to the illusion in the garden, we become restive in our
deck-chairs and remember the telephone or the daily paper or a letter
that has to be written. And reality weighs on us, like a hand laid on
a top, making an end of the spinning, making an end of the music. The
world is no longer a toy dancing round and round. It is a problem, a
run-down machine, a stuffy room full of little stabbing creatures that
make an irritating noise.
V
CATS
The Champion Cat Show has been held at the Crystal Palace, but the
champion cat was not there. One could not possibly allow him to appear
in public. He is for show, but not in a cage. He does not compete,
because he is above competition. You know this as well as I. Probably
you possess him. I certainly do. That is the supreme test of a cat's
excellence--the test of possession. One does not say: "You should see
Brailsford's cat" or "You should see Adcock's cat" or "You should see
Sharp's cat," but "You should see our cat." There is nothing we are
more egoistic about--not even children--than about cats. I have heard
a man, for lack of anything better to boast about, boasting that his
cat eats cheese. In anyone else's cat it would have seemed an inferior
habit and only worth mentioning to the servant as a warning. But
because the cat happens to be his cat, this man talks about its vice
excitedly among women as though it were an accomplishment. It is
seldom that we hear a cat publicly reproached with guilt by anyone
above a cook. He is not permitted to steal from our own larder. But if
he visits the next-door house by stealth and returns over the wall
with a Dover sole in his jaws, we really cannot help laughing. We are
a little nervous at first, and our mirth is tinged with pity at the
thought of the probably elderly and dyspeptic gentleman who has had
his luncheon filched away almost from under his nose. If we were quite
sure that it was from No. 14, and not from No. 9 or No. 11, that the
fish had been stolen, we might--conceivably--call round and offer to
pay for it. But with a cat one is never quite sure. And we cannot call
round on all the neighbours and make a general announcement that our
cat is a thief. In any case the next move lies with the wronged
neighbour. As day follows day, and there is no sign of his irate and
murder-bent figure advancing up the path, we recover our mental
balance and begin to see the cat's exploit in a new light. We do not
yet extol it on moral grounds, but undoubtedly, the more we think of
it, the deeper becomes our admiration. Of the two great heroes of the
Greeks we admire one for his valour and one for his cunning. The epic
of the cat is the epic of Odysseus. The old gentleman with the Dover
sole gradually assumes the aspect of a Polyphemus outwitted--outwitted
and humiliated to the point of not even being able to throw things
after his tormentor. Clever cat! Nobody else's cat could have done
such a thing. We should like to celebrate the Rape of the Dover Sole
in Latin verse.