In England, in Ireland, during the war and the revolution she had known spiritual fear. The ghastly fear of the rabble; and during the war, nations were nearly all rabble. The terror of the rabble that, mongrel-like, wanted to break the free spirit in individual men and women. It was the cold, collective lust of millions of people, to break the spirit in the outstanding individuals. They wanted to break this spirit, so that they could start the great downhill rush back to old underworld levels, old gold worship and murder lust. The rabble.
In those days, Kate had known the agony of cold social fear, as if a democracy were a huge, huge cold centipede which, if you resisted it, would dig every claw into you. And the flesh would mortify around every claw.
That had been her worst agony of fear. And she had survived.
Now she knew the real heart-wrench of blood fear. Her heart seemed pulled out of place, in a stretched pain.
She dozed, and wakened suddenly, at a small noise. She sat up in bed. Her doors on to the verandah had shutters. The doors themselves were fastened, but the shutters were open for air, leaving the upper space, like the window of the door, open. And against the dark grey of the night she saw what looked like a black cat crouching on the bottom of the panel-space.
“What is that?” she said automatically.
Instantly, the thing moved, slid away, and she knew it was the arm of a man that had been reaching inside to pull the bolt of the door. She lay for a second paralysed, prepared to scream. There was no movement. So she leaned and lit a candle.
The curious panic fear was an agony to her. It paralysed her and wrenched her heart out of place. She lay prostrate in the anguish of night-terror. The candle blazed duskily. There was a far-off mutter of thunder. And the night was horrible, horrible, Mexico was ghastly to her beyond description.
She could not relax, she could not get her heart into place. “Now,” she thought to herself, “I am at the mercy of this thing, and I have lost myself.” And it was a terrible feeling, to be lost, scattered, as it were, from herself in a horror of fear.
“What can I do?” she thought, summoning her spirit. “How can I help myself?” She knew she was all alone.