The Pleasures of Ignorance | Page 8

stand shout: "Liberal! Liberal!" It wins by
about ten lengths. Green Cloak is second, but a bad second. The crowd
begins to pour down from the stand again. Those who have won wait
near the bookmakers till the winner has been to the unsaddling
enclosure and the announcement "All right" is made. Then the
bookmakers begin to pay out, and the crowd moves off to the paddock
again to see the horses for the next race.
Friends stop each other and exchange information in low voices. Others
do their best to listen in the hope of overhearing information: "I hear
Tomsk," "Johnnie says lay your last penny on Glasgow Pet," "I'm going
to back Submarine." And the parade of the horses, the hoisting of the
names of the starters and jockeys, the laying of the bets, and the
climbing of the grand stand are all gone through over and over again.
The betting man has no time even for a drink. To the casual onlooker a
day's horse-racing has the appearance of a day's holiday. But the racing
man knows better. He is collecting information, coming to decisions,
wandering among the bookies in the hope of getting a good price,
climbing into the grand stand and descending from it, studying the
points of the horses all the time with as little chance of leisure as
though he were a stockbroker during a financial crisis or a sailor on a
sinking ship.
Perhaps, in the train on the way home from the races, he may relax a

little. Certainly, if he has backed Cutandrun, he will. For Cutandrun
won at ten to one, and his pocket is full of five-pound notes. He feels
quite jocular now that the strain is over. He makes puns on the names
of the defeated horses. "Lie Low lay low all right," he announces to the
compartment, indifferent to the scowls of the man in the corner who
had backed it. "Hopscotch didn't hop quite fast enough." Were he tipsy,
he could not jest more fluently. His jokes are small, but be not too
severe on him. The man has had a hard day. Wait but an hour, and care
will descend on him again. He will not have sat down to dinner in his
hotel for three minutes till someone will be saying to him: "Have you
heard anything for the Cup to-morrow?" There is no six-hours day for
the betting man. He is the drudge of chance for every waking hour. He
is enviable only for one thing. He knows what to talk about to barbers.

IV

THE HUM OF INSECTS
It makes all the difference whether you hear an insect in the bedroom or
in the garden. In the garden the voice of the insect soothes; in the
bedroom it irritates. In the garden it is the hum of spring; in the
bedroom it seems to belong to the same school of music as the bizz of
the dentist's drill or the saw-mill. It may be that it is not the right sort of
insect that invades the bedroom. Even in the garden we wave away a
mosquito. Either its note is in itself offensive or we dislike it as the
voice of an unscrupulous enemy. By an unscrupulous enemy I mean an
enemy that attacks without waiting to be attacked. The mosquito is a
beast of prey; it is out for blood, whether one is as gentle as Tom Pinch
or uses violence. The bee and the wasp are in comparison noble
creatures. They will, so it is said, never injure a human being unless a
human being has injured them. The worst of it is they do not
discriminate between one human being and another, and the bee that
floats over the wall into our garden may turn out to have been
exasperated by the behaviour of a retired policeman five miles away
who struck at it with a spade and roused in it a blind passion for

reprisals. That or something like it is, probably, the explanation of the
stings perfectly innocent persons receive from an insect that is said
never to touch you if you leave it alone. As a matter of fact, when a bee
loses its head, it does not even wait for a human being in order to
relieve its feelings, I have seen a dog racing round a field in terror as a
result of a sting from an angry bee. I have seen a turkey racing round a
farmyard in terror as a result of the same thing. All the trouble arose
from a human being's having very properly removed a large quantity of
honey from a row of hives. I do not admit that the bee would have been
justified in stinging even