General.

Dunstan Times, Issue 2216, 12 January 1904, Page 6

General.

THE PLEASURE OF PERIL. I*iS|RITONS have long boas ted that oj||p 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 sharei 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 upon a world of moorland weeping at its own desolation—a great Welsh 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 towzleheaded sheep-dog, as the British squares at Waterloo withstood the onslaught of the French cavalry. As the dog darts forward the vast fr mt is swung downwards until the gigantic horns actually .enclose him in their spread, so quickly, so constantly, that by the very 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 he 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 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 countenance of a brave man does not smile in the face of extreme danger j it is commonly a strained and terrible mask, not pale, but of 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 unhappy 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 Are, or stopped a runaway horse, one of the most heroic of feats, look upon the world like gods long after the peril h'is 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 hrav© in bravery. 1 ramfimbex sitting beside the bedside of a soldier, the bravest man I ever knew, in I 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 fish-like ©ye, and the bandages around his head, concealing the palpitating horrors of wounds by shrapnel, added repulsivenese to hie 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 eye a 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. 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 P And what phantoms of danger hang over the pillow, what stormings of imminent deadly breaches, what wrecks and conflagrations, what racings 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 I 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 men 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. We got him out when he had sunk te 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 pleasure in all peril, then, and t9f exceptions give a clue to the ruS