II

SHAPES OF FEAR

Now as I look back a little, I see that some of my worst experiences have not hurt or injured me at all.  I do not claim more than my share of troubles, but “I have had trouble enough for one,” as Browning says,—­bereavements, disappointments, the illness of those I have loved, illness of my own, quarrels, misunderstandings, enmities, angers, disapprovals, losses; I have made bad mistakes, I have failed in my duty, I have done many things that I regret, I have been unreasonable, unkind, selfish.  Many of these things have hurt and wounded me, have brought me into sorrow, and even into despair.  But I do not feel that any of them have really injured me, and some of them have already benefited me.  I have learned to be a little more patient and diligent, and I have discovered that there are certain things that I must at all costs avoid.

But there is one thing which seems to me to have always and invariably hampered and maimed me, whenever I have yielded to it, and I have often yielded to it; and that is Fear.  It can be called by many names, and all of them ugly names—­anxiety, timidity, moral cowardice.  I can never trace the smallest good in having given way to it.  It has been from my earliest days the Shadow; and I think it is the shadow in the lives of many men and women.  I want in this book to track it, if I can, to its lair, to see what it is, where its awful power lies, and what, if anything, one can do to resist it.  It seems the most unreal thing in the world, when one is on the other side of it; and yet face to face with it, it has a strength, a poignancy, a paralysing power, which makes it seem like a personal and specific ill-will, issuing in a sort of dreadful enchantment or spell, which renders it impossible to withstand.  Yet, strange to say, it has not exercised its power in the few occasions in my life when it would seem to have been really justified.  Let me quote an instance or two which will illustrate what I mean.

I was confronted once with the necessity of a small surgical operation, quite unexpectedly.  If I had known beforehand that it was to be done, I should have depicted every incident with horror and misery.  But the moment arrived, and I found myself marching to my bedroom with a surgeon and a nurse, with a sense almost of amusement at the adventure.

I was called upon once in Switzerland to assist with two guides in the rescue of an unfortunate woman who had fallen from a precipice, and had to be brought down, dead or alive.  We hurried up through the pine-forest with a chair, and found the poor creature alive indeed, but with horrible injuries—­an eye knocked out, an arm and a thigh broken, her ulster torn to ribbons, and with more blood about the place in pools than I should have thought a human body could contain.  She was conscious; she had to be lifted into the chair, and we had to discover where she belonged; she fainted away in the middle of it, and I had to go on and break the news to her relations.  If I had been told beforehand what would have had to be done, I do not think I could have faced it; but it was there to do, and I found myself entirely capable of taking part, and even of wondering all the time that it was possible to act.