Fear

I

AN American poet and essayist has written his autobiography as the story of one pervasive and unconquerable fear, admitting with candor that his whole social and mental history is tragically conditioned by nothing other than psychic terror.

There is, of course, no way to estimate the part played by fear in the life of modern, unsuperstitious man. But there is some ground for supposing that such experience as that recorded in The Locomotive God is more common than we should judge from the infrequency of its deliberate expression in words. What sets Mr. William Ellery Leonard apart from the common run of us is perhaps not so much the basic substance of his experience as his disposition and ability to anatomize it in printed language. I am prompted to this observation by the astounding number of persons I have met whose actions say, even if their words do not, that they are afraid — afraid of themselves, or of each other, or of their wives or husbands, or of love or marriage or paternity, or of the future, or of failure, or of the dark; afraid of not getting a job, or afraid of not keeping one; afraid of things nameless and indefinable, and to a degree beyond what it is at all possible to rationalize; afraid, in fine, of life.

So much of this abject terror do I come upon, sometimes by confidential disclosure and sometimes by involuntary detection, that I now wonder if practically every sensitive person has not at some time had to struggle against a sort of alarm that had only to be outgrown to be seen as apparently irrational and needless. Consider the artist, archetype of the sensitive person — is not his characteristic modern mood a distrust of life based, whether he know it or not, on fear? As a public character he has chosen, for the chief mood of his articulateness, skepticism as to the value of existence — and what is this skepticism but hatred, and what is hatred but fear made dynamic? As a private person the artist is harrowed by distrust of his own powers, fear of the publishers and the public to whom he must entrust his work, and jealous hostility to his fellow craftsmen. And as for the insensitive, when, as occasionally happens, they are clutched by these paralyzing terrors their helplessness is made even more complete and terrible by their very lack of the imagination to know what is the matter with them.

It has become clear to me that the laws which govern the behavior of psychic terror have little correspondence with those which affect the want of physical courage or of what is called moral courage. Physical and moral cowardice are genuinely alike, on a lower and a higher plane. They are simply a deficit in respect to a quality, bravery, which can be cultivated, as all soldiers and all saints have cultivated it. Both are amenable to reason and to experience. If you are afraid of something, it is always open to you to behave as if you were not, — to do w hich is bravery, — or you are open to the demonstration, by logic or by experience, that the cause of your fear is not so appalling after all and that it is possible to face it and to get used to it. But to be afraid of nothing is a vice without any corresponding virtue, a disease without a treatment. The fear which is of the soul, not of the body or the mind, is a weakness against which there is no type of strength open to cultivation. It is not the result of a lack of courage; it is simply an experience, one which partakes shockingly of the nature of pure accident.

This modern soul-fear, fear without rational cause and persisting in the face of reason, no more betokens want of courage than being crushed under an automobile betokens want of health. No one can be forearmed against it, because it issues no forewarning. Everyman supposes himself immune until he finds himself overcome. One cannot even know the time or the agency of one’s cure. The thing passes away as clouds dissolve from a night sky during the hours of sleep. When morning comes the sky is clear, but you have no notion when it became so. We are taken unaware and released we know not when. The whole business is as mysterious as life and death themselves, as incalculable as chance.

The most that is open to us, in the present state of knowledge, is the mere suggestion of probabilities based on actual experience. Until someone has discovered a technique for the control of psychic fear — and the founder of such a technique will have done as much for a need of his fellow creatures as he who created bacteriology — it is idle for any man to prescribe for the terrors of another, or to lay down any positive generalizations whatever. The record of any one typical experience may contain invaluable clues; from the aggregation of enough such records there may be educed in time a comprehension of the disease and a formula for its treatment. So much is about all that can be said. Pending that time when the virus shall be isolated and its vaccine prepared, all that any one of us can do is to tell as accurately as possible the story of his own experiences and symptoms, with no more remarks thereon than he can make in the mood of open-minded inquiry.

In that experience of my own fear which is here related I detect at least one possibility of uncommon usefulness. Nearly all such encounters are so shadowy in the mind of the person most concerned that he can make nothing of them in words. Indeed, they are sometimes so impalpable as to make him deny to himself that anything at all has happened. The stark definiteness of this experience of mine rendered that sort of evasion impossible. The inward sense of the occurrence may have had no traceable relation to its outward appearance, but at least (he appearance was unmistakable and unforgettable. And it is describable. I shall never know, perhaps, what I feared; but I have always known what it seemed to be. The episode has the useful property of crystallizing into a sharp, an almost physical issue something which is ordinarily experienced as no more than a vague pressure upon the heart or a blighting chill in the spinal marrow’. You can narrate an encounter with a ghost that you never expected to see. It has that advantage over the mere state of being inexplicably afraid that you are going to see one,

II

In December of 1906 I was a few months under twenty years of age and a sophomore in one of the large Eastern universities, to which I had come from a small-town high school. My standing in my classes was respectable, as it had invariably been. I was not in trouble with the college administration, or in any trouble at all. My habits were neither very solitary nor very gregarious; the courses I was taking did not exact an amount of work in excess of what it was pleasurable to do; I was keeping reasonable hours; and so far as I know I was in admirable bodily health. My two parents and four grandparents were all long-lived and very healthy persons; so were the four great-grandparents whom I remembered. I never heard of any mental abnormality or conspicuous queemess in any of my forebears. As to religious beliefs, after a pious and orthodox bringing-up I had become a convinced rationalist and skeptic; but the transition had been well under way at fifteen, and occurred gradually and without shock, leaving my inherited ethical code intact. I had no superstitions that I know of, and no sensory defects. It seems to me that I was in a condition of emotional balance, as human beings go.

I was living at this time on the second floor of a quiet private apartment house a few minutes’ walk from the campis— the sort of unpretentious place that is inhabited by a married instructor or two, girl conservatory students with mothers or aunts attending them, elderly couples whose children have married or gone away, teachers, librarians, and the like. My roommate and I were the only undergraduates in the building that year; and he was the only person in it whom I knew, even by sight. In November someone in the building had scarlet fever, and a room was quarantined. The parents of my roommate, who lived in a suburb of the university city, made him sleep at home and commute to classes; so that for some weeks I was left alone.

My bedroom was so placed that from the bed I looked diagonally to the right through a doorless doorway to the outside wall of the study, which wall consisted chiefly of three large windows close together, with a low window seat built in beneath. In the corner between the doorway and the nearest of these w indows was my flat-topped desk, with a chair facing it. The arc lights on a neighboring street were bright enough so that, even on moonless nights, the study window beyond the doorway w as a clear-cut rectangle.

On a very cold night of early December I had gone to bed fairly early, and was just drifting off to sleep when it flashed into my mind that I could not remember releasing the catch on the automatic bolt of the door from the study to the hall. It was my habit to snap this catch back on entering the room and to leave the door unlocked until I went out or to bed. I remembered drowsily that I had hung my coat, with its waistcoat containing a valued watch, on the chair at the desk, just through the bedroom door, and that in my clothes there were also a few dollars in bills. But I could hardly imagine sneak thievery in such a place; I might have locked the door without remembering it; and, if I had not, the omission seemed not worth investigation in the freezing wind that agitated the curtains of the open bedroom window. I put the thought out of my mind and went quickly to sleep. (These details are wearyingly trivial, I realize. But endure that: perhaps they bear compound interest, and I must make it clear just how the thing happened and how utterly objective it apparently was.)

From a deep, sound, and (as I was convinced then and after) dreamless sleep I came broad awake with a gasp of the most intense fear, my heart losing a beat, and found myself partly propped up on one elbow and staring through the doorway into the study. The form of a man, silhouetted against the big study window beyond, was bent over the desk chair as if going through the clothes hung on it. At my convulsive movement — an involuntary one — he straightened up and stood frozen for a second; then I heard the soft pad, pad, pad of quick steps across the study carpet, and the next instant the click of the automatic lock. And I was lying there alone in a sweat of terror, with my heart hammering me like a big fist.

As soon as I was physically able — perhaps in thirty seconds — I jumped up and lighted onejgas burner in the bedroom and another in the study. The first thing I noticed was the tiny alarm clock on the bedroom mantel, which pointed to five o’clock in the morning. Clothes, watch, and money were untouched. There was no sign of an intruder anywhere. The outside door was locked.

I closed the window and went back to bed, because the day’s heat supply would not begin for an hour or more. As I remember it, I did not go back to sleep. I was entirely certain that a sneak thief had entered the room, been startled at his work, and slipped out without accomplishing anything. There was, certainly, a discrepancy: the snapping of the lock, which was as distinct as anything ever received by one of the five senses, contradicted the impression of a door left unlocked, since one could hardly imagine the thief releasing the catch, either as he entered or as he fled. But such a perception could make no headway against the distinctness of the impression itself. And it was a waking impression; that is, it was accompanied by none of the sensations that, in my experience before and since, consort with dreams.

The next evening I spent in the study, quietly reading. I went to bed later this time, with the door indubitably fastened, and I did not go to sleep so soon. My mind persisted in dwelling on the event of that morning, but not, as it seemed, with any special tensity. Sleep, when it came, was normal as far as I can know. But it was crashed into by the same experience over again — the precise experience de novo, not attended by the sense of repetition, of having lived through the same thing before, that is so common in dreams. And again it was five o’clock to a hair.

You will easily believe that I found sleep skittish the third night. I was firmly convinced that the invasion had been an objective reality and that what one ignorantly calls ‘nerves’ had been answerable for the repetition of it. It had been quite as terrible the second time as the first; and if ‘nerves’ were going to do that to me again, it would still be no less shattering the third time. The fact that there was no difference in horror between the imagined occurrence and what I called the real one did not then strike me as significant. It seems to me now that no ’real’ experience could so frighten a human being. But it was useless to argue in that vein against the sensory actuality of that first appalled waking.

I lay there thrashing it over in my mind, talking sense to myself. For of course this silliness had to be conquered. And I fell asleep just in time, I suppose, to go through the same vivid terror a third time — at five o’clock. I felt as if any more of this would make an old man of me. Two friends from my home town possessed, a block up the street, an idle bed. That night, after having undressed and gone to bed as usual in the faint hope that sleep would pounce on me before I could stir, I got up, dressed, and took possession of my friends’ extra bed. In it I slept each night until the holidays; and after them my roommate was back.

III

It was many weeks before I could find even a small cranny in my mind for the speculation that the original experience itself was without objective reality. I had thought I knew all about hallucinations — and who ever heard of one that you could n’t in two seconds dissolve by seeing it for what it was? At the age of nine I had once walked at twilight along a lonesome road, and jumped nearly out of my skin when a black monster clutched at me — and at the end of my leap of absolute terror had come to earth actually laughing at the grotesque fire-scarred stump of a familiar old apple tree, distorted by being seen out of the corner of my eye. Hallucinations were like that. This was not like that.

What finally did the business — not all at once, by any means — was this: the following April a physiological psychologist convinced me that it is impossible to see anything (I mean anything that is really there) within the first few seconds after waking from a sound sleep. He convinced my mind, that is to say. My sensory recollection died harder — or, rather, it did not die at all, and I eventually had to believe in spite of it and to regard it as discredited. For the time was to come, and within that next year, when I believed what I feel sure of to this day: that no sneak thief entered my room or pawed over my clothes, that there was never any muffled padding of feet on the carpet or snapping of the lock, and that the first experience was of the same substance as the second and the third. I had committed the fallacy and incurred the waste of trying to apply a faculty which I thought was moral courage to something about as amenable to that faculty as the shadow of a great whale would be to a harpoon.

That, I have said, was in December of 1906. And it was September of 1913 before I knew I was a sound man again. It happened to be more than seven years before I faced anything that could rank in my mind as a test. If the test had come, it might have showed the same result in five years, or three, or two. But I could not go out of my way to incur it. If I had learned anything at all in the four ghastly nights, I had learned that it was sheer futile bravado to attempt a self-conscious defiance of the unknown enemy. Let the test come naturally, when it. would, and prove whatever it proved. Throughout seven years, then, it was my lot to sleep every night where a call would,bring the answer of at least one friendly and familiar voice. And all that time I lived with the subtle discomfort of not knowing what my mind would do to me in solitude and darkness among strange surroundings. Nothing at all, perhaps; and, perhaps, everything to break down my hope in it. Certainly, while living in other ways a full, sane, normal life, I was shrinking inwardly from the trial, though I believe that at no time did I actually evade it.

In 1913, at the end of the summer, it devolved on me to paddle across a lake of western Maine to its uninhabited shore, spend one night in some buildings on a deserted peninsula, close the buildings for winter, and go alone on foot through the mountains to New Hampshire. As I went to bed that night, under the rafters of the bark lodge, with the friendly enigmatic night noises of the deep woods reaching my ear from all sides, I was thinking how many persons fear and shun that kind of solitude, and how preposterous it is of them to feel like that; and yet it was distinctly in my mind, in a way not controllable by will power, that in a few hours I might be wrenched out of my own peaceful sleep by a fear so unnerving that it would stop my heart there and then. There was no alarm clock here. My mental alarm I had set for four, there being a long day ahead; and before a suspicion of dawn had filtered through the black spruce growth — indeed, before I knew that I was going to sleep — I was boiling coffee in the kitchen, and wondering at the back of my mind what would have happened had I stayed asleep until five. I still wonder.

The next dusk found me snug for the night under the low curtain of branches of a hemlock in a dank wilderness at the north flank of Black Mountain, in the Wild River valley, with many miles of trailless going behind me. (On South Baldface in those days there were no paths except the vestiges of old logging roads, and the westward stretch from the mountain to Wild River was a tangled morass of burned-over forest and swamp, through which in spots it was next to impossible to chop a way.) Lying sixty feet from the water hole at which I had cooked my supper, with my pack for a pillow, I was entertained until sleep came by the tramp of porcupines, deer, and bears visiting the small pool; their tracks identified them in the morning. Once in the night I woke up to a startling impression that something was tearing at my pillow. There was a scurry and crackling above; and when I turned on a small pocket flash light it fell full on a red squirrel scampering aloft in my hemlock tent. I laughed at him, and he swore companionably at me in the idiom of his marauding kind. My watch said midnight. One amazingly lustrous and unwavering star hung at the zenith. I turned over and slept, I think dreamlessly, until dawn.

The second night out I spent on fir branches at the divide of Carter Notch, outside the shelter by the twin ponds. It was not until the night after that, when I reached the old stage office on Washington in the midst of a September blizzard, that I found myself hack in a region of human companionship, I have had few happier experiences than the unexpected discovery of an acquaintance there among the whirling snow clouds. No man is equipped to get the real good of human companions so long as there is a trace of doubt in his mind as to his ability to cope with himself single-handed, in utter solitude.

As a matter of common sense, no one should ever go through even our New England mountains alone. The chances of a twisted ankle are too good, and one’s helplessness in that event too complete. Nevertheless, I shall always be grateful for the particular mode of my discovery that certain torn tissues of my own personality had mended themselves. Again, at last, I was as innocent of fear of the empty dark as the two-year-old who had delighted to creep from the early winter lamplight of the kitchen into the shadowy penetralia of the warm dining room, for no reason except that it was so engagingly mysterious there.

IV

Now, I am willing to appear as having been a coward, a weakling devoid of self-command, if my doing so will throw a glimmer of light on anything for one other victim of the nameless terror. I suppose I could even manage to appear so without the protection of anonymity if that would make any real difference. I am willing to consider, and have always considered, the possibility that I was wrong to give up the open fight when I did. Perhaps I ought to have looked the unknown enemy straight in the eyes until I could stare him out of countenance; perhaps anything less than that should be construed as contemptible self-pampering.

All I can say is that it still feels to me as if I went about my task in the right way. As far as a man can judge himself, I believe that I did not give up until it was irresistibly clear that I could make no headway by the more direct method. I fully believed that to push myself much farther in the direction apparently dictated by moral courage might be to thrust myself over some disastrous brink, to the peril of my selfcommand in all other areas — and perhaps without even effecting my salvation in this one. It was not open to me, by any mental tactic at my command then or afterward, to grasp the wholly intangible character of the enemy. That conviction had to build itself up slowly and gradually, out of the undermined foundation of my first realistic view of what had happened. Not until this process was complete could I invoke a test without the suspicion that I might be playing wantonly, inexcusably, with my whole emotional balance, even my sanity.

What course of action, I asked myself, would leave me the better man in relation to all ordinary exigencies? For I was sure beyond argument that my attitude toward t his affair had some potential bearing on everything else. If, for instance, I were to be caught in a theatre fire, with a chance to behave either as a decent citizen or merely as one unit of a hysterical mob, which mode of dealing with my infirmity would leave me the better prepared? My answer then was that I might easily put every ounce of w ill I could muster into the direct method of solving this one problem, and thereby reduce myself to a spineless jelly for all the other problems that were sure to come up. I still think this may have been the right answer. I doubt the economy of an out-and-out contest with an unknown adversary, when it threatens to drain one’s nervous force and when the nature of the adversary is likely to become clearer with the lapse of time.

But one is bound in common honesty to admit that the alternative may be true. Fear is a wonderful incentive to self-deception, and no one of us knows himself through and through. It is at least possible that I should have read my situation as a challenge to sheer self-respect, answered the challenge as I started out, and counted on a victory at any cost as the one method of asserting my general integrity. How am I to know? Who can toll me? I can know that the method I chose enabled me to do enormous quantities of acceptable professional work, and that it eventually recov ered for me the full measure of my inborn capacity for delight in solitude and mystery. But I have no way of knowing that the alternative method might not have resulted in even more and better work and produced an earlier recovery.

At all events, it would seem that I underwent an extraordinarily definite, localized, describable contact with just the sort of baseless fear that runs in a vague diffusive way through so many modern lives, to the appalling distortion of their pattern. Here is a man who is convinced that there is an unjust and inexplicable prejudice against him on the part of those who have t he power to set the value of his work, to make or mar his career; and the conviction paralyzes his eff ort. There is a woman who has got it into her head that her lover or her husband is discontented with the best she can give him, and that his secret, dissatisfaction is chafing the bond in two. Yonder is a mother in whose mind has taken shape so clear a sense of the futility of her guidance that she lets her children run wild to disaster. A sea captain whose grasp of the astronomy of navigation made him one in a thousand, and whose landfalls had been for years miracles of exactitude, was always in such a sweat of terror for thirty-six hours before the end of a voyage that it was physically impossible for him to keep the deck. An accountant who will assuredly die of old age unless he worries himself into the grave is being worn to a skeleton by a perfectly nonexistent cancer. A successful writer whose work has shown steady growth over a period of years is so convinced that his powers are exhausted that it takes him tortured weeks to nerve himself up to letting a thing of his own get out of his hands. A student in the first fifth of his class killed himself because he knew that he was going to fail disgracefully and could not face the parents who had made sacrifices. Every one of these, with countless others, is utterly unable to believe that his fear has no tangible, objective basis. With a corner of his intellect he knows well enough that he is creating his own trouble, blowing up the balloon with air from his own lungs, trembling before something that is n’t there. But what good is cold reason when he saw the apparition in the room, heard the snap of the automatic lock? It is one thing to know that there is no danger, quite another thing to feel yourself safe. If there could always he a bridge across this gulf, what a difference would be made in a multitude of terror-stricken lives!

V

There is one more possibility which I must name, though only in the most tentative way. It strikes me as just conceivable that all fear of this psychic breed may at bottom be mob fear and not a strictly individual phenomenon at all. It is a commonplace of knowledge that the dominant mood of a mass will infect even individuals the least predisposed to that emotion. Of course, in the ultimate sense any such emotion as terror is socially caused: men are made into fearing creatures by each other’s existence. But I have in mind a rather more direct and immediate sort of contagion than that.

A few nights before my scare I was entertaining in the same room the two men from my home town already referred to. We sat drinking cider, talking over college affairs, and exchanging witticisms in the archaic mode of 1906. Presently something was said which reminded me of that tale of Poe called ‘The Black Cat.’ To my surprise neither of those men had ever read it. I turned out the gas, lighted the green-shaded student lamp, and read it to them forthwith, sitting at that desk and in that chair which a later night was to make momentous to me. As I neared the crisis of the grisly tale — charged, I still think, with a wholly illegitimate kind of horror— I noticed that, one of the two men, from the couch across the room, was glaring at me with a strangely blank fixity. A moment later it became evident that he had hypnotized himself by staring at the unnatural green glow of the lamp shade on my face; but I had no idea of this in time to do any good.

Suddenly he leaped up with a wild shriek. The next moment he was groveling on all fours, making unearthly feline noises and trying desperately to claw his way out of sight under the low couch. He was, pro tempore, the Black Cat.

It took all the strength of both of us to handle him. We got him to his room and raised by telephone a doctor who presently applied a hypodermic. It was four o’clock the next afternoon before the poor fellow came to the surface; and then he was perfectly himself, without the slightest recollection of the bizarre interlude. Neither of us ever said much to him about it. We let him think he had become intoxicated on that strictly sweet cider.

One of these men, the victim himself, was physically frail, inhumanly ambitious, and worn to a husk with overwork and overstudy. The other, who kept his poise in that unnerv ing emergency, came of a family several members of which, including his father and his only brother, had been periodically insane enough to be confined. He was, of course, a much scared and shaken boy that night.

His roommate collapsed as soon as we got him to his own bed, and I paced the street before the house while waiting to guide the doctor. There was a prodigious display of the aurora borealis that night, the first I had ever seen, and this, the midnight hour, and the deserted street conspired to round out an impression of such unearthly strangeness as I have experienced but one other time in my life, and that at the deathbed of one dying after hours of delirium.

Was what happened to me later, within a week, a queer echo of this occurrence? Did I somehow get hold of the terror of a momentarily overthrown mind and store it up unconsciously for some days and then re-create it in my own terms? Did the controlled panic of (he other lad, without his knowledge or mine, serv e as a sort of amplifier of the original current of fear? Can it have been, ultimately, Edgar Allan Poe who bowled me over, with two abnormally impressible youths to help him and the fantastic queerness of that midnight background to make it. stick? Certainly I traced no possible connection at the time, or for long afterward. Now, I am not so sure.

One must not be too sure of any generalization about this human fear, or even of any seeming probability in a given specific instance. Progress toward the solution of such problems will be made — is perhaps being made all the time. I should be uncommonly happy to think that the recital of my own experience has counted toward half a step of that progress, as it will have done if it speed one individual toward the perception that he is harrowing himself with apprehensions as immaterial as mine. Such causeless dread seems well-nigh omnipresent in the Western life of our day. We dare hope that it will not always be so. But there is nothing that even the foolhardy would dare assert with positiveness, unless perhaps this: —

The last enemy that shall be destroyed is — fear.