THE PLEASURE OF PERIL.
J3RITONS have long boasted that their sports are popular in proportion to their danger, that a spice of danger is a necessary ingredient of a sport. But if the boast is British, the idiosyncrasy is not ; it is not even solely human, though the beast that shares it most seems indeed to have all of humanity but its vices. Outside my window as I write—the window of a remote farmhouse looking out upon a world of moorland weeping at its own desolation—a great Welch bull, his neck clothed with thunder and red murder in his eye, is standing with his back to the byre-door sustaining three charges a minute from a towzle-headed sheepdog, as the British squares at Waterloo withstood the onslaughts of the French cavalry. As the dog darts forward the vast front is swung downwards until the gigantic horns actually enclose him in their spread, so quickly, so constantly, that by the very law of chance it seems as if the bounding, barking lump of woollen activity must be eventually impaled. The bull is not afraid, only annoyed, but the dog is deliriously happy, though it is momentarily as near death
as a man hurling himself at a pair of lunging bayonets. And be knows his danger; he winced a little at that
last lashing sweep, recovered himself, snapped at the tossing fringe of matted hair, then fairly grovelled as one of the horny lances grazed his flank. But he is up and at it in a second, enjoyment in every line of his body, and when finally called off by the voice of the cattleman, a voice as hoarse and savage as that of a Swazi brave, rolls away from his quarry smiling all over his handsome face. The counte- nance of a brave man does not smile in the face of extreme danger ; it is commonly a strained and terrible mask, not pale, but of a leaden hue, with deep furrows where there should be fulness, and dark-blue shadows in the hollow places. There is no joy visible in the body of a man playing with peril; it is as if the flesh and muscles stiffen at the approach of their arch-enemy, and upon the face looking closely at death is cast a foreshadow of the look of the dead. But the eye through which the soul looks is alight ; those who have seen many terrible things confess that there is nothing in Nature akin to the glorious joy which shines from the un- happy face of a brave man in danger. Nor does the light fade in a moment. Men who have borne themselves nobly in a charge, or laboured to save life in a wreck or fire, or stopped a runaway horse, one of the most heroic of feats, look upon the world like gods long after the peril has passed away, though all but their eyes may be unmoved. The divine fire of physical courage breaks out from the eyes, like flames from the windows of a burning house, even at the recital of another's heroism, so fierce is the pleasure of the brave in bravery. I remember sitting beside the bedside of a soldier, the bravest man I ever knew, in a hospital in Natal, where he lay grievously wounded, and telling him of the rush of the Lancashire Brigade over Pieters Hill. He was an ugly man, with a fishlike eye, and the bandages around his head, concealing the palpitating horrors of wounds by shrapnel, added repulsiveness to his ugliness. But as I described the scene, and being fresh from the sight of it I told it then as I could not now, a glare came out from somewhere and settled in that man's eyes until I might have been looking into two bull's-eye lanterns on a foggy night. He would have given his life to have been there, they said ; the poor, vulgar, mauled features said nothing, but were ennobled into invisibility by that unearthly light.
No one can doubt the joy that attends peril who has seen the men of certain negroid races prance into battle, or, still more significant, into the dangers of another's battle. Could authority, blasphemy, or even the sjambok keep the Zulu and Basuto scouts who accompanied British columns in South Africa out of the zone of fire ? How they laughed and bounded, or if on horseback galloped, shrieking with pleasure, where the Mauser bullets hissed and hummed, gambling with death, unasked, not wanted, big black childish nuisances often, noble in nothing but the nobility of physical courage, but in that with all the blood of all the Howards of heroism. Their dead Kings, Cha,ka and Dingiswayo, knew how to organise a Bantu holiday when they used to bid their impis charge and stab each other for nothing but pure sport. Where, to an induna and his spearmen, was the pleasure in women or maize-beer compared to the fierce embrace of danger, the drunkenness of the drink of deadly combat?
Men may pass the whole of their lives without either being themselves, or seeing a fellow-man, in danger. "Yet who in his dreams has not sported with jeopardy, making a mock of it, and awakening with the same strange exaltation as fills the encounterer of a living peril, perhaps with the same fire in the eyes ? And what phantoms of danger hang over the pillow, what storminga of imminent deadly breaches, what wrecks and conflagrations, what ratings through the black night on horseback in pursuit of robbers, or being a robber, away from certain visionary horsemen, soldiers or constables, who thunder after ! What fun they all are! But there are hazards which, real or spectral, are no fun at all, even to heroes, which glaze the eye instead of firing it, and " turn the bold bombardier to a little whipp'd dog." These are the lonely, helpless perils, the falling from dizzy cliffs, the being swept away on irresistible torrents, and one horror that once overtook a man doomed to torture before death, that of having a foot jammed in the points, with an express train due, and no one nigh to help.
I once saw a brave man frightened by something such as these ; he was snipe-shooting, and had walked into one of those bottomless bogs which quiver all over their acres at the mere tap of the foot like the breasts of a laughing girl. We got him out when he had sunk to his chest, but the morass did not shudder more than he. But when he died on Spion Kop he died like the fearless soldier he was ; the great rock on which he fell was as likely to fly from its firm base. There is not pleasure in all peril, then, and the exceptions give a clue to the rule. There is delight only in the danger wherein something or some one is overcome, wherein there is an enemy over whom to triumph, or a fellow-mortal to save or benefit. The man toppling over the verge of the cliff, or struggling in mid-torrent, has nothing in view but his solitary death, —there is nothing in the bitterness of death so agonising as its uselessness. Only give me a prize, says the human soul, and I will condemn my habitation to any end ; I will make it climb the swimming cliff, or plunge into the racing waters, or rush through the flames ; it shall take the same risks calmly as the creature it would rescue did with a yell of terror; only give me a prize, honour or a life, or the chance of honour or a life, in exchange for death or the chance of death. How small the prize of honour for which men have made faces at death : a lion's skin, a mountain-top ! Yet the Selous of humanity standing face to face with the great yellow savage of the desert, and the Whympers hanging over eternity on a " cornice," have drunk the cup of joy to the lees, and, will again. And how small the prize of life! A woman was burnt to death in London some years ago while attempting to save a cat. The fields of South Africa were sown thick with splendid exploits, but that was natural enough : " glory is the sodger's gain, the sodger's prize is honour" ; but was there a flower finer than the deed I once witnessed in the High Street of a pro- vincial town done for nothing, for a minimum of honour, perhaps a " Serve him right !" for an atom of a life P A crowd was chasing a little mad dog down the street, pelting him with the thousand things that come like magic to that Hecatoncheires of the streets, a mob. They brought to with a mighty cohue in front of a shop-window, forming an excited ring around the battered, wild-eyed little object in their midst, all willing to wound, but greatly afraid to strike except at long range. A young man, an officer who had lately joined the regiment quartered in the town, came out of the shop-door, and forcing his way through the crowd, stood a moment looking down on the miserable fugitive crouching in the mud. "I don't believe he is mad," he muttered, and, stooping, caught the panting creature in his arms. The crowd caught their breath (it is a curious sound when three hundred men do that together), and the young man, passing through them as they Bucked back from him and the horror in his arms, slipped away down a side street. The dog was not mad, and the young man lived to face less appalling dangers in Natal ; but I did not credit his assertion, reiterated at mess that evening, that he had not believed the dog to be mad, for I had seen his face as he snatched it up, and it was the face of the men who stormed over Pieters, and of the wreck in hospital who had listened to the tale of it.
But this pleasure in peril is not the only delight of living beings in things naturally antithetical to their state, though few of the others, so far as we can judge, are shared by animals. There is a pleasure in noise—the crash of thunder or the report of a cannon is pleasurable—a pleasure in speed— who is not exhilarated in a railway train or motor-car ?—a pleasure in fatigue—the tired sportsman, or the soldier after a long march, feels a satisfaction in his actual weariness apart from that afforded by its relief. I have even noticed a grati- fication in privation. These things are all fundamentally inimical to life in a greater or less degree ; whence springs the attraction they possess P Some mightier Darwin, tracing back the origin of spiritual species, may resolve, the mystery some day. In the meantime it were an adven- turous speculator who, nnfortified by knowledge, descanted! upon the fascinating theme of idiosyncratic variation. Yet it is plain that what Oliver Wendell Holmes calls " the im- ponderables" also have their species, and therefore their descent. Forms of love and hatred, of fear and inclination, are as constant and well marked in animated nature as t he genera of rodents and carnivora. Their myriad shapes are as little likely as those of the latter to be the products of either abrupt creation or parthenogenesis. May they not, too, have descended from► similarities, perhaps, as with organic forms, with likeness to their progeny so faint as to be apparently opposites P Very early man—the man who filled up the obviously vast hiatus of aeons between Adam and tool-making Noah—possibly detested danger, fled from it without disguise or shame, perhaps paid rites to it as a Voodoo,* a repellent and Chthonic deity. Even now the bodies of all men wince at danger. Is it part of the supernal logic that the indestructible should progress faster towards perfection than the destructible ? The soul of man is no older than his body; who dares to think what Wordsworth dared to say, that it comes trailing the clouds of glory of a previous and celestial entity ! If that were true, what hopeless cycles of existence roll into view, cycles of futurity as ungovernable as those of the past. Yet the body of man, to judge by our records of its powers and wants, is much the same to-day as it was ten thousand years ago, save that then it was despot of the soul; whereas to-day the soul has attained the very reversal and acme of mastery over it, the making friends of its enemies and enemies of its friends. The spirit of the brave, o'erinforming the tenement, bears the unwilling clay joyfully forward into the arms of destruction. The dearest dreams of those who have never faced danger are those in which they close with it. And as for the coward, half his
agony is that he cannot share the pleasure of peril. Z.
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