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
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 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.