Fear

I

ONCE I saw thirty young men face for several hours the prospect of death at sea. With one exception they gave no sign of fear. Nothing but a shade more smiling and exchange of jokes than was natural in a chill blast and an angry sea would have told the fact that the disabled scout-patrol boat would probably never reach port. One Naval Reservist, however, feared most pitiably. His eyes stared restlessly out of a yellow, twitching face; his pale lips moved mechanically in idle questions and still more futile suggestions. More gently bred than most of his mates, he was also morally the superior of most of them. This they knew; they looked at his distress without scorn and with an entirely friendly pity. I suppose they dimly perceived that it was a doom for which he was in no way responsible, and felt the irony of a patriotism that had cast him into a service in which ordinary courage was simply in the day’s work. Simple men — as I was constantly to learn in the Navy — often have the most extraordinarily delicate and just intuitions of personal crises. What they sorrowed for in a loyal mate who was born to fear they would have mocked at in a calm-sea braggart.

Since M―happened to be the only physical coward I had ever studied in danger, and since I knew that he had in full measure all the finer moral qualities that are supposed to make for courage, I naturally pondered his case. The trouble I can only surmise. Water of any sort spoke peril to him. He feared as much in a benign day of drifting under blue skies as he did in those rare moments when the safety of the scout patrol hung by the hair of a spark plug or a steering pinion. His life on a patrol, which for most of us was ordinarily a recreation, must have been a hell, and no man less deserved it. I could only suppose that we had to do with some profound lesion in childhood, some fright at the seaside or even in the baby’s bath, that had scarred and warped his consciousness for life. Perhaps a psychoanalyst could have located the fount of his fear, but the war was too short for such studies and cures. We could only hope that the capricious special providence which sat up aloft at Newport would put our friend ashore. I suppose he was a classical instance of what we loosely call the physical coward: that his malady was akin to that unreasoning dread of pointed things, of enclosed spaces, of certain animals, even of certain odors, which has afflicted many an equally gifted person.

II

That kind of fear is not my subject. I am thinking rather of that rare fear which falls on an ordinarily brave person; and I am considering no ordinary or passing qualm, but that terror which clutches the throat and loosens the knees, exudes in cold sweat, and, while it lasts, disables abjectly the physical and moral man. I have felt it a few times, as I suppose everyone has felt it. The occasion was generally the slightest. I have feared most horribly when I was really in no danger. In every case it was panic before the unknown, generally before an unknown which thrust itself upon me before mental preparation could be made and the unknownness thus diminished. Perhaps this is the fear of the normal man and, if so, animals and savages must suffer terribly from it, for the unknown bulks large in their lives, and their memories are short. Probably the demon-worship so common among savages arises from the need of exteriorizing their fears. Your demon, however appalling, is at least a fixed and calculable thing. Even to an orthodox soul, Satan moving up and down the earth and seeking what, he may devour is more endurable than is the unexpected touching of a big cool fungus in a forest stroll after nightfall.

In any case, my own abject fears have always been occasioned by the unknown, and generally by an unknown that proclaimed itself with instantaneous suddenness. My boyhood fears grew out of my reading. Being a good reader of the ‘Frank’ books, — I wonder if that exemplary boy-hero still delights boyhood, — whenever I passed dark doorways on my way to bed I imagined the Indians would leap out at me, and there was a distinct prickling sensation under my tow-colorcd scalp-lock. But this was rather a flirtation with the idea of fear than fear itself, for I only half believed that the Indians had really crept up from peaceful South Street to our third story.

But it was real fear when I visited my grandparents in the Connecticut Valley, and the lightning cracked about the house and the thunder growled and boomed endlessly between the hills. I shut it out by cowering under the bedclothes, and trembled long after it had passed. It was not the quite common nervous fear of electrical storms, — for I have since headed my tiny yawl into thunder squalls without fear, — but the fear of an angry God and an imminent Day of Judgment. I can hardly recall a time when I had not read the Book of the Revelation, the gorgeous imagery of which has always captured my imagination; and our pastor had incessantly preached that the day of wrath was at hand. So when the lightning was let loose there came vivid if confused images of sinister horsemen in the sky, and the unstopping of awful vials, and the bass prelude of the thunder, hushed only to bring expectancy of the trumpet blast, and my small and unworthy self standing among the newly risen and uncanny dead, to answer for my sins before an all-knowing and inexorable God.

I had deeply sinned, notably against the Commandments concerning honoring parents, false witness, and stealing. I had chewed forbidden green apples, carefully ejecting the pomace in order that I might say I had not eaten them. I had stolen from the pantry incalculable quantities of brown sugar — now, I fear, an unknown dainty to childhood — and raisins. Once, in the cellar of a building under construction, I had stripped myself and wallowed deliciously in the clean sand-pile. Although this was not a specifically forbidden indulgence, for even parents cannot foresee every working of original sin in a child, this indecent episode actually troubled me most. It seemed a hard thing to avow before the last tribunal, and calculated to add to the weight of guilt the almost worse sting of ridicule.

I suppose I suffered more from fear in those otherwise happy summers in Connecticut than many people do in a lifetime. The panic gradually abated as I saw that after many thunderstorms the last trump had never blown, while, as I began to guess that our pastor’s confidence that the Last Day was imminent would not be borne out by events, his other preaching encouraged me to hope that although God had been notoriously difficult in the matter of apples He might be indulgent as to brown sugar, raisins, and sand-piles. So the old fear wore off and, perhaps because there had been so much of it, I have no sure recollection of being deeply affrighted again until I was in the thirties. Meanwhile I had traveled fearlessly through a cholera epidemic, the risk, such as it was, being entirely calculable.

III

Next, fear came to me in the most ridiculous and preposterous of guises — panic fear over nothing. All day long I had been whipping the oceanic eddies below the Grande Décharge for ouananiche. Evening fell, and my two Indian guides, knowing the difficulty of taking the canoe up the portage in the dusk, had gone ahead, cautioning me not to lose the trail. It was a question of half a mile uphill by a well-beaten path, and I trod it without thought, only to find myself suddenly on a broad logging-road which I had never seen before. A moment’s reflection would have told me that the road must lead away from the landing-place; that my guides must be within earshot and would answer a call. At worst I had merely the prospect of a bivouac on the island; many a time I had camped under worse conditions — nothing to fear but blackflies; matches to fight them and to cook the ouananiche in my creel. As getting lost in the woods goes, I was in the most auspicious case possible, even if my guides should not find me till morning.

None of these perfectly obvious reflections were actually made, though I had made them profitably in many a similar emergency. A sense of being hopelessly lost and a mad desire for escape overcame me. I began to sprint along the logging-road as I was headed until sheer breathlessness and the great gray stretch of Lake St. John, quiet in the twilight, checked my foolish flight. Then I sat down, thought out what had happened, and retraced with care the steps I had taken in panic haste. In a few minutes the halloos of the guides answered my own.

This kind of fear is common enough, and it has driven to unnecessary death many a novice in forest and mountain. It was only odd that it befell one with a woodsman’s experience. It was the suddenness with which the sense of being lost confronted me that was my moral undoing. My frightened muscles worked before my mind could grasp a very simple situation.

Next comes to mind a relief ship off Messina in earthquake time, and a sullen rainy evening. For two days we had lived in increasing filth and disorder, so that the devastation of the ruins and the spectacle of the maimed and the dead being impartially extracted from the rubbish heap that Messina was become had been almost a relief. Having amazing news and being unable to get away, we newspaper men were chafing until we hated each other and, I fear, even the wounded, who both littered up our ship and delayed its sailing. Every day there had been little shocks and crashingdown of creviced walls that still stood. Suddenly there was a great explosion, far heavier and more palpable than the minor shakings and mutterings to which our ears and nerves were accustomed. Dead silence on the erstwhile clamorous deck of the crowded ship; wailing from the refugees, camped on the shattered quay. I trembled as I waited for the tidal wave to break the ship on the stone quay, and when the wave delayed I rushed to my stateroom and turned my chattering teeth to the wall.

Nothing had happened but the bursting of the boiler in the ship alongside. It was too sudden to be borne. Probably if a meteorologist had told me that another earthquake would destroy us all within a minute I should have met the event like a brave man. At least I hope so.

IV

Evidently mental preparation is of the essence of all courage. We do what we have willed to do in advance, and the more vividly we have anticipated peril in imagination the more manfully shall we face it when it comes. The Navy, a service where minor peril is in the day’s work, does well to prepare its men; it beats into every beginner the duty of keeping still in danger and waiting for orders, and that of keeping quiet and not moving about even if no orders come. It is the first move that counts for panic. A man who stands firmly on both feet in time of danger, and keeps his mouth shut, will always be sufficiently brave. Such is the faith of the Navy, and it works in practice — witness the drill of the sinking Camperdown and many a less spectacular instance.

I saw how this worked when the fire ran over the oily water where twenty patrol boats were at dock. It caught on the painted sides of two submarinechasers, roared up the gulf between them, crackled up the canvased sides of their deck-houses, and licked twenty feet in the air on their flagpoles and radio-stretchers. But all this was merely spectacular; what really counted was that it also gnawed at the thin wooden boxes containing the fourteenpound shells. The molasses-like trickle of melting trinitrotoluol from the heated depth-bombs was unpleasing to the eye, but otherwise negligible. What really counted was the first fourteenpounder shell. If it detonated, so would all the depth-bombs, and our little fleet would be blown to an ooze indistinguishable from the habitual slime of our basin. This we all knew — some five hundred half-trained men on twenty little scout-patrol boats. The situation was entirely calculable and well understood. Three quarters of an inch of canvased pine — three or four minutes — a certain number of gallons of water — stood between us and the most complete annihilation conceivable.

A dash for the land would have given an off chance of survival. Nobody thought of it, or if he did he promptly repressed the thought. All simply waited in stillness and reckoned the event. For a few seconds my muscles carried me behind the triced-up grating of the gangway. My muscles mistook it for a protection. My mind smiled at the folly and took me to the after six-pounder, to be blown up where I belonged, at my station. That was everybody’s thought. Meanwhile I had none of the proper feelings, did n’t recall my loved ones, nor yet did my life unroll itself before me like a scroll. I merely kept my eye on the fire, as it throve on the ammunition boxes thirty feet across the pier. Would the first shell start? Just a dull curiosity, as if the event, while of general interest, hardly concerned myself. As I looked up and down the fleet, the picture was everywhere the same: quiet men, standing still and wondering. The Bluejacket’s Manual plainly had wrought its perfect work in us all, and though our taking off would have lacked the superb ‘swank’ of the Camperdown it would have been entirely ‘seagoing,’ and that is all that can be expected of landsmen in little patrol-boats.

Naturally I took a proper pride in a steadiness which had been tried by fire; but I was soon to learn that there was no precaution that really worked with the old enemy Surprise, if he could catch you without time to think.

V

This essay ends, as it began, on a scout-patrol boat, but differently, for it concerns a fear where no danger was involved — merely the worst fear, that of the too-sudden unknown. S. P. 227 had just come in from four days of convoy escort and patrol, when orders came to meet a British ship with a precious cargo off Barnegat, at seven next morning, and escort her to New York. We were caught with empty bunkers and half a crew. I put in the coal when I had expected to make up lost sleep, and at one o’clock I had my stern toward Ambrose Lightship and was pointing southward against the new and ugly short chop of a southerly half-gale. Suddenly our call letter flashed urgently, north of the lightship. I ignored it, for the time was short to our morning rendezvous off Barnegat whistling buoy. But the signal flashed so incessantly that I woke the captain, who with an oath of disgust ordered me to turn back. At the place whence the signal had come there was nothing — just blackness, confusion of waters, and uncomfortable proximity of lightless monsters stealing into the harbor. The mystery — a simple one, merely a fellow S. P. tired of waiting — was disquieting at the moment, and I turned the ship toward Barnegat in a restless and querying mood.

At that moment of uncertainty there rose far up the bay, directly over New York, an incredible column of rosy light. It climbed swiftly and intact thousands of feet into the air and spread into an incandescent rose. Followed, before the mind grasped the spectacle, a concussion which shook me to the marrow.

I had felt the like from Capri when Vesuvius was in full eruption. But this was unexplained and inexplicable. The imagination made wild work of it: an infernal plot! New York destroyed! My knees knocked together. I tottered on the dancing-bridge and clutched the rail for support, while I trembled and the chill crept through my greatcoat and oilskins. Perhaps it was not long, but it seemed long to the moment when I pulled myself together, recalled that, whatever had happened to New York, I had a course to steer and a ship to meet. When the coppery face of the bo’s’n appeared over the rail and told me the hold was dry, that was reassuring. I became once more an officer, and for the rest of a wild night the wonders in sight and sound of the exploding powder-works at Perth Amboy, while still unexplained, became no longer terrifying, but merely an unexpectedly romantic decoration for an uncommonly arduous bit of routine duty.

I am no psychologist, and have no mind to analyze these personal experiences of fear. Sufficient if I have suggested that the worst fears are those of imagination, and that we suffer most when there is nothing to fear at all. Possibly one might conclude that a well-trained person would never suffer disabling fear if he fully understood whatever emergency might arise, or if he had time to adjust himself to it even without understanding it. But the usually patient vassals of the rational self have their sway in certain shocks. Their animal quickness outruns the surer mental processes of their master, and from time to time they assert transiently their primal rule.

Perfect love is said to put away fear, and, theoretically, perfect knowledge ought to do so. Practically, the more we know, whether through experience or imagination, the less we shall fear. And the hope of the race seems to lie in such an increase in knowledge as will check and shorten those panics in which a man or a mob may either tremble impotently or turn and rend others as fear turns to fury. But since our knowledge is never complete, and the silent vassals never sleep, there will probably be no time when a man can be quite sure of standing or dying, a gentleman, unafraid.