THE AVERTERS OF TRAGEDY

New Zealand Herald, Volume XLVI, Issue 14157, 4 September 1909, Page 1 (Supplement)

THE AVERTERS OF TRAGEDY

BY ALICE FERGUSOX.

If New Zealand were as waterless as the desert of Sahara 'we should run a gravechance of not knowing how much heroism is to be found among its population. There are, as we know, various kinds of heroism. They all, I dare venture to say, get as well exemplified in this country as in any other, though some of them here as elsewhere are not readily recognised by the unthinking as heroism. But the heroism I am referring to cannot be mistaken, for it is prominently labelled heroism wherever it shows itself all over the world. It is the heroism that makes people risk their lives to save, or to try to save, other people from drowning. Scarcely a day passes in the summer months, or indeed in any month of the year's twelve, but we open our newspapers to read of some such deed done. Of course, one doesn't mean to imply that that kind of heroism can express itself in our Dominion no other wise than by saving folks from watery graves. The possibilities of tragedy, seen and unseen, stalk as closely on the right and on the left of all of us on dry land as on water. And the averter of tragedy need not be idle, though there were not enough water in New Zealand to drown a mouse. But the general run of accidents on land allows little time or chance for a saviour to intervene before fatal injury is done. The bushman might as welt try to arrest, the fall of a falling tree as attempt to get his mate out of its way before it tails. The great saw of the "timber-mill has finished its ghastly work of mutilation on a man before his neighbour is well aware that it is begun. How uselessly would the bystander risk life and limb trying to snatch its victim from the juggernaut path of the racing motor-car, or from the rails in front of the express engine ! Now • drowning* is a comparatively leisurely kind of business. Indeed, those who have earned a proper qualification to speak on the subject of being drowned "all but," say that it allows the drowning time to live their lives over againin the quickness of thought. So it is reasonable to inferwhat is amply supported by facts —that the saver of life finds his" most and his best opportunities in the perils that beset mankind from the presence of a blessed sufficiency of water. We have a blessed"sufficiency of water in this country, and pay a heavy tax for it in human —notwithstanding the remissions that heroism is able to obtain for us. I dare say, to accommodate ourselves to the conditions imposed upon us by our natural surroundings, we shall grow amphibian in time. But evolutionary processes are admittedly slow, and, meanwhile, we suffer from our apparently unlimited liability to be drowned. Of course, we have great offsets to this objectionable liability in the host of invaluable material advantages that come to a country from its being, like ours, so rich in lakes and rivers and creeks, so superabundantly, supplied with sea-board. And, although not precisely a material advantage, should it not count for something that the very liability itself makes stimulating demands on the noble human instinct that prompts the saving of life regardless of one's own personal risk? The annals of our. Dominion, chronicled day by day in the newspapers, furnish instances in plenty to show how much more general is the altruistic exercise of the life-saving instinct than one might otherwise have suspected. Indeed, they almost make us privileged to believe that the common, , everyday man or woman, whom we greet in passing on the lonely country road, whom we brush shoulders with in the crowded city street, has it in them to put their own lives in pawn to save a drowning fellow-creature, should occasion arise. The capsize of a yacht, the foundering of a punt, the fording of a swollen river, the carelessness of a bather, and so on, and so ou. That accident on water does not end in tragedy nearly so often as it might is due to the intervention of the spectator, who, by luck or good- guidance, is usually to be found on the scene. " He," or it may be she, "went to their assistance." This action on the part of the spectator seems to be as stereotyped as the phrase reporting it in the newspapers. We, who read the report, are accustomed to carelessly accept the spectator's action as a matter of course. But, if we take the trouble to stage the scene and actors in our minds, and put oursehes in the role of the spectator, we realise that it took some real heroism to do what he did— though the spectator most probably did not lessen the heroism by realising this himself.

To be sure, when strong ties of blood or friendship unite the spectator of an accident with its victims, we discount something, more or less, of the heroism. For do not our own hearts tell us that the agonising dread of losing those very dear to us, the overwhelming desire to keep them with us, are not wholly unselfish spurs to drive us to jeopardise our lives to preserve theirs? But when it comes to the casual witness of the accident, the passing stranger to whom the ' unknown man in the water is nothing, how shall we explain his readiness to go to the other's assistance'.' He is not an expert swimmer, and life is as dear to him as it is to every sane man with plenty of human ties and interests. Why then does he risk it as lightly As one who had been studied in Iris death To throw away the dearest thing he owned, As 'twere a careless trifle?

Had the unknown man in the water, whose cries for help he rinds so irresistible, met him on the road, half an hour ago. and asked help of him to the extent of five pounds, or perhaps of only five shillings, he would have refused it. and felt righteous indignation 'at tae fellow's impudence in making the request of a tal stranger, let, now that the fellow asks help of him to the hazard, not of a few .paltry pounds or shillings, but of all that he has and is, he does not think the demand outrageous, he does not spurn it as he would have clone the infinitely lesser one on his purse. No; '•he goes to his assistance'' with all speed. He may be able to bring him safe to land, or he may have to return, disappointedly, alone — he may never return at all. If one considers iff A few minutes ago ho stood on the bank, pulsing with strong life that made bim feel the future almost as much his as the present, the fair and interesting world very palpable to him; and his. too, to see and enjoy. And now he lies dead, entangled in the weeds of the lake, or borne along by the treacherous ocean or river current that overpowered him—the world wiped out for him as completely as if it had blown itself up into meteorolites. This need not have been had he not gone to the assistance of the man who was nothing to him, to whom he would have refused a comparatively trifling sum of money. And he was not compelled to go. But, there I am wrong! I expect he was compelled to go, for impulses are not yet all neatly labelled and numbered and "given in the dull catalogue of common things ;" and impulses may sometimes be compulsions that drive us to "do things that are not in the least to our material advantage, present or future. Possibly he may not have counted the personal risk before he went to the assistance of the drowning man—possibly he may, and have gone all the same. It is imagination that must be reckoned the chief coward-maker in these days, when we have given over breeding consciences of the active and vigorous order common, apparently, in the time of Hamlet. Prince of Denmark, or of Shakspcre. And most of us roust feel a thrill of sympathy mingle with our condemnation of the poor mortal who stands at the water's edge, "letting' "I dare not' wait upon "I would'" because his imagination paints, with too strong colours and too much ghastly detail, the fate that may be his if he follows his desire and attempts the rescue of the drowning man. If he defies his fear and goes, he is of the kin of heroes, and. the greater Ins conquered fear, the greater the hero. For heroism has been aptly described as "flic brilliant triumph of the soul over fear/'

Of course, to many who jump into the water to save others from pending death in it, their personal risk appears to them less than what any of us incur crossing Queenstreet in the busy hours of the day—though it may be readily understood that evil is more "likely to befall even the strong, practised swimmer when he gives himself to the embrace of a fluid in which he was not meant to live, than when he moves on land in his native element. Yet, it is just as well for the keeping up of the supply of averters of tragedy that most of them do not seem to be v.rduly tyrannised over by their imaginations. The obvious material fact that a fellow-creature is at tight grips with death fills their unimaginative minds to the apparent- exclusion of everything else save the instinct to go to the rescue. We may allow ourselves to believe— nothing of worth comes in this world without someone paying for it —that they owe tins extremely valuable frame of mind to imaginative ancestors who attained the heights of heroism only after herculean struggles with their own fears had qualified them "to transmit the life-saving instinct untrammelled to i the sub-consciousness of their descendants. What shall be said about the child averters of tragedy? For we have them: oh, yes, we have them in numbers sufficient to make us feel that the small boy or girl whom we chide, not undeservedly, for the exasperating variety of their naughtinesses, will do all they can, if need were, to save a drowning playmate. And sometimes more than they can— then there is a. tale to be told of great pathos. Cannot memory supply each one of us with numerous instances, heard, read, or personally known of, where children have bravely and unselfishly saved others from drowning, or, it may be, have perished themselves in trying to do so? And the child, self-centred in his little world, is naturally selfish ; the child untaught, untoughened by experience, with an outer world so frighteningly unknown beyond his own. is naturally timid. Yet the child, selfish and timid, "will walk out into the deep water, where he sees his little comrade choking and struggling, to try to bring him to land. And if he only succeeds in getting himself into the same difficulty, a third child, who has the fate of the other two appallingly present to his eyes and cars, will yet attempt the deep water in his desperate desire to save them. Sometimes they are all saved to become men worthy, let us trust, of those high moments of their early youth. Sometimes they all perish. And it has so happened that these last were all children of one household, and all the children which that one household had. I wonder what were the feelings of the parents when they saw the still little bodies and learned that • they owed it to the loving bravery of their'children that their house had been left unto them so wholly desolate! The Romans had a well-known saving : "Timidi mater non Hot" ("The coward's mother has not got to weep." Did these parents envy the mother of the coward?