Run Over by a Bus
By STRIX wee paneemayou: I said, donkey's years ago. The one who spoke English had already com- posed himself for sleep.
'Comrade Alexei say,' he drowsily muttered, `we think you are man who loves the risk.'
Huge rain-drops hissed into the embers of a huge camp-fire. The vodka had died in us as we settled down for the night on a remote (and, as it later turned out, the wrong) spur of an unimportant mountain in the Caucasus. Only Alexei and I were, so to speak, left with hounds in that quest for somebody's soul upon which the fall of night and the availability of hard liquor have long been apt to launch the inhabi- tants of rural districts in Russia.
`Comrade Alexei is quite right,' I said, as I inserted myself into my damp sleeping-bag and dropped out of the hunt.
Like so many statements made out of polite- ness or expediency to foreigners, this was a gross exaggeration. Nobody—even if they are com- paratively young, as I then was—likes a risk. Risks, like cloves, are not loved for themselves alone, but for the flavour they impart; and their flavour, like that of cloves, is not to everybody's taste.
Man owes a great deal to his penchant for taking risks, for although he has often got into trouble through taking too. many of them he would have got nowhere if he had taken none. Yet the curious thing is that in general we do our utmost to eradicate the risk-taking impulse. The custodians of small children are unremitting in their endeavours to dissuade their charges from dangerous or uncertain courses; and as the children grow up almost the whole trend of their upbringing is towards security and away from hazards. Young birds, if subjected to these pres- sures at a formative age, would never fly. Yet human beings retain their perverse inclination for enterprises whose outcome is doubtful and may be disastrous.
Risks are of so many and such various kinds that it is surprising that they all find takers. Nobody takes the lot. The gambler, who stakes everything on the turn of a card, embraces the chance of facing ruin. The gentleman rider in a steeplechase accepts with alacrity the prospect of a broken collar-bone or worse. Would they swop risks? Possibly, for one man has sometimes played both parts. But would he find an equal savour in the hazards of the rock-face or the parachute-jump? Would he be attracted to the stealthy, soft-footed practices of burglary or sabotage? I doubt it. The appetite for risks is highly selective. The fighter-pilot and the bomb- disposal expert, the submariner and the infantry- man, the archer and the knight—neither has ever been able to understand how the other found the stomach for his duties.
Risks are, on the whole, stimulating things; but there is one category of them which produces a flat, dispiriting effect. A risk of this slatternly kind is taken, or is said to be taken, by the motorist who, rather than stop and fill up with petrol, accepts the possibility that he will run out of the stuff just short of his destination. I speak from long personal experience- when I say that he does this from idleness or impatience and, win or lose, gets no kick out of doing it. He can hardly be said to have taken a risk; he has merely omitted to take a precaution.
Sir Francis Younghusband once wrote : 'Time after time, risk pays. Deliberately, and with your eyes open and in full confidence, run a risk for .a good end and you will come out safe with your end achieved. Shrink from running a neces- sary risk, and danger will relentlessly pursue you, hunt you down and crush you. . . . The cautious is not necessarily the best course. In most cases it is the worst.'
I have always thought that there is a lot in this. Just as the naturally prudent man is ill advised to make a sudden foray into daring, so the bold man courts trouble when he refuses a risk which he likes the look of. When he does this he becomes vulnerable, and shortly after is run over by a bus.
When and why did the omnibus become the Nemesis of our age? Although a great many people are, alas, run over every year, very few of them are run over by buses; yet in my life I never remember hearing any other formula em- ployed to evoke the image of a drab, common- or-garden, accidental fate. Was there once a par- ticularly poignant or ironic fatality from this rause? I know. that Dr. Livingstone was not run over by a bus, but did perhaps some other cele- brated explorer succumb to the impact of a No. 17?
I do not know. I doubt if anybody does. But it seems strange that, of all the dangers which my compatriots have voluntarily or involuntarily faced during the twentieth century, they should have selected the bus to symbolise an arbitrary and unexpected doom.
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